Yep. The duration of the electrical discharge is in microseconds. The light produced by the ionized air lasts much longer.
If triggering on RF, we're dealing with short microsecond bursts. If optically triggering, we have a much longer flash to work with.
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Use a mirrorless SLR. Nothing here says it even has to be an SLR. A DLR or even a rangefinder will work.
we just had a lovely lightning storm here last night. I wans't able to locate slave strobe to see if they pick up lightning, but I was able to make some observations.
the amount of lightning up inside the clouds was spectacular, with nonstop flashing of around 3 to 10Hz for at least 20 minutes. This is the noise I want to eliminate, and due to the fact it's cloudy during a huge storm, long exposures will be blown out by all this extra light. Giant flashes in view of the camera which are hopfully visible bolts of lightning is what I want to catch, automatically.
"motion sensing" is not a feature of series of SLR I'd use, so that's not an option.
I need to find a few photodiodes to play with next.
I'm going to guess they burst detectors are just way too sensitive. Again, last night the amount of flashing in the sky I could see was going on at about 3-10Hz for 20 minutes. most of this wasn't visible and distinct lightning, of if it was, it was behind me and would not have been photograhable anyways.
The visible lightning was much brighter than anything else going on in the clouds, which makes me keep thinking I want detect it optically. I did note some of the visible cloud to cloud lightning was rather "slow" to form and involved multiple discharges. So it's possible I'd want to trigger 1/4 or 1/2 second exposures, which is doable.
I can't stand spray and pray methods, plus I want to be able to go back inside and make some tea while the camera+detector and does it's job all by itself, and then not have to delete 27,000 junk photos.
the viewfinder window port of the camera is the best place to toss a sensor as far as I can tell. It will only pickup what the lense itself can see so there's nothing to adjust.
I'm not so sure about this being necessary.
the d3s is mind blowing fast, and really exciting lightning strikes last for a long time.
there's some other funky behavior the camera has in mirror up mode when you want to take multiple shots, but I can't recall exactly what this is at the moment.
Even if the pulses in the timeline are super short, the total duration is long enough to be visible to the eye, even if you blink.
Some of the cloud to cloud lightning visibly grows "streamers" as they say in tesla coil talk.
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