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Monday, August 11, 2008 - 11:01AM

Photoshop image stacking: tower lightning

By DAN ROBINSON

Editor/Photographer

From Dan: How the crime of copyright infringement took $1 million from me and shut down my operation.

In September of 2025, my work is generating the most income it ever has in my career. Yet, I'm being forced to shut down my successul operation, against my will, due to one cause alone: 95% of that revenue is being stolen by piracy and copyright infringement. I've lost more than $1 million to copyright infringement in the last 15 years, and it's finally brought an end to my professional storm chasing operation. Do not be misled by the lies of infringers, anti-copyright activists and organized piracy cartels. This page is a detailed, evidenced account of my battle I had to undertake to just barely stay in business, and eventually could not overcome. It's a problem faced by all of my colleagues and most other creators in the field.

Photo stacking is a feature in Photoshop that takes a sequence of images from a single scene and overlays them together, so that the elements appear as if they were shot in a single photo. I'm not a huge fan of excessive manipulation of images, though there is arguably nothing wrong with it as long as it is disclosed fully to the viewer/buyer. These ones came out looking interesting, so I'll make an exception. This is the result of stacking my tower lightning photos from Lexington, Kentucky back on February 5 and from St. Albans (WVAH site) from June 3. These results would have been impossible to pull off with the camera alone. In the case of Lexington, the exposure would have needed to be some 20 minutes long to get all of the strikes in one frame. That would have worked if there was no ambient urban light - but in this case, the glare from the city lights would have blown out the sky in a few minutes' time. Each of the Lexington exposures were around 30 to 45 seconds long. The WVAH tower shots were 1/40 second reaction exposures - long exposures would have been impossible in the full daylight.