Watching a Thunderstorm with a Drone – Timelapse

The other night, some severe thunderstorms passed near our area around sunset and put on a fantastic lightning show in the clouds. There was some ground to cloud (or visa versa) strikes happening, but we were located over 10 miles away from this storm, so it was safe to launch.

We launched our Evo 2 Pro drone up about 150ft in the air and started recording. We did experiment a little with using manual or auto exposure on the camera, so sometimes the ISO was set to the point that you might see some noise in the image. The first half was recorded in manual mode at 1600 ISO. The last half was in auto mode, with an ISO ranging from 1600 to 3200 to 6400 as it got darker.

The image has NOT been color corrected, so what you see, is what the drone’s camera saw. It was recording in 4K / 30fps.  This video was compressed x4 to speed it the action up, as we understand that there’s only so long that most folks are willing to watch a video like this. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did watching it live.