Stefan Official
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I’ve been photographing for around 30 years, and for just as long I’ve wanted to photograph what is probably Germany’s most famous lighthouse: Westerhever.
The problem is, when you live at the other end of the country, you don’t exactly pass by every weekend. So it actually took decades until Westerhever finally happened to lie on our motorhome route north.
I had exactly one evening there, which I had wisely reserved as “photography time” with the family. 😄 So I couldn’t really choose the weather. The only thing I knew was that I wanted to photograph the lighthouse after dark, with the beacon visible. On a grey day I would probably have had other ideas too, but those would have required the right sun position, the right weather and, above all, much more time.
Unfortunately, several interesting paths through the salt marshes were closed because of repair work, so I ended up on the dike, set up my tripod, and after all those years finally had Westerhever in front of me.
About an hour later, something happened that I really hadn’t planned for.
My phone started warning me about an approaching rain front. A little later, my lightning tracker also began sending alerts.
Of course I was excited, but I didn’t really expect the storm to move right into my frame. At first there were flashes to my left, later to my right — and then, suddenly, chance decided:
Alright, tonight you get everything.
A lightning strike appeared right where I wanted it.
Jackpot.
That’s the moment when you stand behind the camera grinning to yourself for quite a while.
Although I should probably mention one small detail: standing on an exposed dike, being one of the highest points around while a thunderstorm is approaching, is not exactly one of the smartest ideas in the history of photography.
Actually, it’s pretty stupid. 😄
Photographically, though, it was ridiculous luck. A combination like this is rare enough that I could probably have gone back there again and again for years and still never caught exactly that moment.
And that is what makes the whole thing slightly absurd:
I wanted to photograph Westerhever for decades. Then I finally show up once, set up my tripod, get handed my photo of the year — and two hours later I’m gone again.
Easy. 😂
There was, however, one more challenge with this photograph: the extreme contrast.
By that time it was already very dark, with practically no other light sources in the surrounding landscape. At the same time, I was shooting directly towards the lighthouse’s extremely bright 2,000-watt xenon short-arc lamp, whose light can still be seen from around 40 kilometres away.
So there was an enormous difference between the almost black landscape and the intense light of the beacon — making it rather difficult to capture both convincingly in a single exposure.
There was another little complication as well: the lighthouse beam is constantly rotating.
I had actually checked beforehand how long one complete rotation takes — roughly 15 seconds. That matters when choosing the exposure time, because I wanted to capture the beam deliberately and as completely as possible, rather than ending up with only a small fragment of it or odd overlapping light patterns caused by the rotation.
In the end, 17 seconds turned out to be a good compromise: long enough to record the beam beautifully, but still short enough to retain structure in the storm clouds.
And then all I needed was for the lightning to strike at exactly the right moment. 😄
Sometimes photography is careful planning.
And sometimes you plan everything you possibly can — and nature decides whether you get the photograph.
 ⚡ When Luck Strikes by Stefan Zimmermann Official, auf Flickr
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