Lightning on the 7D

[icantdotreflips]

I am going to be shooting a film in the near future on the 7D that involves a scene with lightning. A good comparison would be the scene at the end of dressed to kill when nancy allen nearly gets killed by the therapist while in a therapy session. Lightning is almost necessary for this scene to work but am extremely worried about the partical expose on the 7D. I was going to use a stobe placed outside the windows to mimick the lightning but realize i cant because the flashes would be to quick. It has been suggested to use a light on a dimmer and quickly dim and brighten the light but to me this doesnt seem practical. If this is the only way i guess thats what I will be doing, but i wanted to ask if anyone out there has shot a scene on the 7D with lightning? If so, how did you set it up to avoid the partial exposre that the 7D is so famous for? Thank You

 

[Calomile]

As you clearly point out, the problem is with partial exposure, so the logical step would be to increase the duration of the flash by an extra frame of time (1/50th or 125th) to make sure that you get the entire frame fully exposed with the bright light. In that respect, the guy who suggested using a normal light might not be so stupid, you'll get more reliable, replicable results using this.

As ever, if you have access to any gear you might like to try a few tests to make 100% sure you can't use a strobe or a normal light to get decent results.

Also, I can't do tre flips either, don't worry!