As a pro multi-themed photographer, the white whale of my craft is an all-night thunder and lightning storm where I don’t have to worry about being rained on all night, or swept away like Dorothy and Toto in the Wizard of Oz, or being carried out to sea by giant waves.
As evening fell at my Niigata kominka, I drove five minutes to our local beach, which is one of the few beaches on our planet which is growing, not eroding. This is due to ’the Sado Island effect’ which reduces heat fluxes from the sea surface by weakening leeward winds. At the same time, the horizontal wind convergence downwind is weakened. Basically, every summer, Sado Island endures a thorough pounding from thunderstorms, but the atmospheric event I witnessed last night will be one that Sado Island residents won’t soon forget. And lucky me, I had a front row seat with clear starry skies for the entire night. On the flip side, during winter, the Sado Island effect causes typhoon strength winds and waves that lash the shores, especially my home Echizenhama beach where the sand just keeps piling up. Every March to June, heavy equipment such as front end loaders and other heavy machinery remove tons of sand for city works and farms, leaving us a shoulder deep 100 meter long by 700 meter wide natural Sea of Japan swimming pool including tetrapods with ropes attached from swimmer’s safety.
From my vantage point, Sado Island is 32 kilometers out to sea and perfectly centered. This region is known as the Sado-Yahiko-Yoneyama Quasi-National Park, quasi because the park includes the sea, as well as my home hamlet on Japan’s main island, Honshu. Lightning flashed through my kominka’s windows, and I quickly dashed out to the beach, for what I soon discovered was a generational thunderstorm that had so much energy that it sustained its raw elemental power until dawn, WoW! Seven hours of uninterrupted thunder and lightning. I took over 500 images with my Nikon Z9, my lens of choice was the Nikon NIKKOR Z 24-120mm f/4 S. I also had the Nikon NIKKOR Z 14-24mm f/2.8 S, but I never used this lens. Of course, I had a sturdy tripod, and I used a shutter release cable. My camera was set to bulb. Exposures were 20-40 seconds, and my ISO was between 400 and 1600; my aperture was between f/8 to f/16. These two images in this newsletter are but 500 I took, wow what a night. I had so much time on my hands, as the lightning was non-stop, so my experience transformed into a lucid dream come true, and I had time to experiment, thinking outside of the box with textbook camera settings. In short, I wanted to see how far I could push the Nikon Z9. My conclusion? The camera kicks a_s! Thank you, Nikon for finally producing a pro camera body with a proven high megapixel sensor.