RED ONE camera shooting Lightning Strikes!

After reading online about the problems inherent with the CMOS 'rolling shutter' effect, which plagues all CMOS cameras such as the RED ONE, I approached an upcoming 'storm shoot' with some major apprehension.

I tried to contact anyone who had already shot faux lightning storms using the Lightning Strikes super-strobe units, but I had no luck.

So, I tried to re-create this effect with large still-photography studio strobes. These seemed hit or miss and probably 50% of the time I did perceive the split exposure across the frame of the notorious "rolling shutter".

We even played with DSLRs of various makes... seems the cheaper the point & shoot camera was, the better the flash! Who knew....

Finally, literally days before the shoot date, I managed to get a hold of the president of Lightning Strikes himself!I asked him about the RED's ability to expose a full frame of his Lightning Strikes units (without the rolling shutter effect) and he said that although he didn't have any real experience with the RED and his lamps, he was fairly confident that there should not be any problem... he suggested I set the flash control from 'constant' to 'adjustable' and make sure that the sparks who controlled those units didn't play too fast with the ignition button. So, 40+ feet in the air on condors, we aimed our lamps over the intended scene, condors on both sides of a suburban home.

Rain trees were rigged in other man-lifts & condors as well as giant Ritter fans and a 30' Cam-Mate with which to haul my new RED through the blasts of water from the rain-trees!

As darkness fell, we fired up the

gennys and hit the Lightning Strikes buttons and created all sorts of havoc!

Zero rolling shutter effect!!!

WOW! Was I happy!

It really was a beautiful lightning effect with none of the typical split exposed frames which you get from smaller still-photography strobes.