The Making of "Imminent Drenching"

How the winning photo of the "Storm" contest was made

By Phil Thomson IPA in Photo Contests on Mar 30, 2023

"Imminent Drenching"

Firstly, my sincere thanks to everyone who both nominated and then subsequently voted for my image in The Storms Competition. I am truly honoured and humbled. It was quite an incredible moment and I was Blessed to be able to capture that lighting bolt during that shoot.

It was captured at one of my favourite, go to locations in the Barrabool Hills not far from my home in Geelong. It was an afternoon in late in January, this year…a Summer thunderstorm which can occur if the weather conditions are right began to build as it came over the plains to the West of us and this particular storm really did drench Geelong and dumped up to 92mls of rain in some suburbs in about an hour, causing major flash flooding, the main highway from Geelong to Melbourne being cut off, major power outages in a number of suburbs and at least a dozen people having to be rescued from the floodwaters.

Often if there is a storm brewing in the area I will try and head up there through the pouring rain, as I did on this occasion, and either get behind the storm and sometimes catch another one as it approaches.

As this storm had all but passed the spot where I was parked and was continuing to head for the Geelong area, I was able to quickly get out of my car and stand at the head of that driveway to the farm and shoot 9 or 10 shots and was blessed with that lightning strike of that storm cloud in one of them I did continue to drive up and down that road and got some more excellent, emotional atmospheric shots that afternoon too.

This was captured with my trusty K1-MK2 & 15-30mm Pentax wide angle combination, which includes a Fotodiox .9 GND filter system. I use this combination for about 99% of my landscapes, weather and sunrise/sunset shoots.

As all of my images, this was shot in RAW(DNG) Format.

My main editing software is ACDSee Photo Studio Professional, and I am using the current 2023 version to firstly import the RAW files from the SD card and renaming them as per the date shot, E.G. 1.24.23-44DNG and putting them into the area folder for 2023. i.e. BARRA-DOG ROCKS-2023

This way, I find it easier to keep track of each image into districts and times of the year photographed, as well as subject/location folders. With this image, as with many others I want display and sometimes print, I ran it through DxO Pure RAW to ‘clean it up’ i.e. realise it’s full colour potential and fine detail of the RAW file. On screen and in ACDSee, it actually increases the MB size of the files by 2 to 2.5 times, giving more info to work with.

The actual editing/improvements were made in ACDSee Photo Studio Professional in Develop Mode, which is Non Destructive to the original RAW file and changes made are carried in a Sidecar file. Those changes included increasing the General Exposure, reducing the Highlights, increasing the the Contrast, reducing the Saturation but increasing only slightly the Vibrance. Other standards in the General section included Clarity and marginally increasing the Dehaze sliders. The White Balance was basically ‘Cloudy’, but I did reduce the Yellow marginally to make it look more realistic.

Very little was done in the Light Equaliser, just darkening it marginally in the sky and lightening the foreground minimally.

The Colour Equaliser and Colour Wheel channels allowed me to work on specific colours, tweaking them in darkening the greys & blues and & lightening the yellows & greens. I also reduced the contrast in each of the major colours in both the Equaliser & Wheel.

I then worked on the Tone Curves to crisp up the image & colour edges by using Presets that I have worked out and stored in that channel. Following this I just used one of my Presets, modified down, in the Split Tone Channel which adds a little warmth to the shadows and a little coolness(bluish tone) to the highlights.

In the Detail Section of the Develop Tools, I used my 400 ISO Preset that I have made to sharpen the and reduce the Noise factor of the image file.

My final step in the process was to use the Geometry Tool in the Develop Mode and apply the Preset that I have made for images shot on my Pentax K1 mk2 and Pentax 15-30mm lens. That Preset was made from the dropdown menu that ACDSee have listing all camera brands & models and lenses. I did leave the cropping at Original, particularly with a lot of the story/action happening in the sky. I quite often will use the 16:9 format for my landscapes/sunrise/sunsets as often the main focus is around the mid section of the image file.

For comparison: here is the original image:

Click image to enlarge and compare with the edited version

I just love being able to be out amid Creation capturing what I see and am presented with, particularly at sunrises & sunsets and during some very interesting weather situations like storms, rainstorms, rainbows and the like, and have been Blessed to capture some very Precious moments including this one, and near where I live in Australia, some fantastic locations, including many ‘on my doorstep’.

Once again, many thanks to all who nominated and voted for my image on this wonderful forum.

• Pentax K1-MkII Camera
• Pentax 15-30mm f2.8 wide angle lens
• Fotodiox .9 GND Filter
• Settings: 1/50sec @ f10, 400 ISO
• Wide open at 15mm
• Hand held
• Edited in ACDSee Photstudio Professional 2023.

Phil Thomson IPA