A bird, a tree and Canon 1D Mark III

I rented a Canon 1D Mark lll and I went to Lake Garden to test this camera.It was a cloudy afternoon and it looks like it was going to rain again.

Suddenly I saw a bird landing on top of a tree. I quickly took out the 300mm telephoto lens fixed onto the Canon 1D Mark lll camera. I set the ISO to 400 and I wanted to capture the bird resting on top of the tree. The bird is small compared with the tall tree.

When I came back and sat in front of my computer to have a closer look on the images that I had captured, I noticed that the bird land was perched on dying branches with no foliage.

The tree looks healthy except at the top. further down to the body of the tree, the skin and barks are dropping off, too. Something must be wrong with the tree.

I enlarged the images and lucky it turned out fine. I did some enhancing of the images. I enlarged one of the images with 100% cropping to compare it with the original. I think Canon 1D Mark lll has not failed my mission.

But……what happened to the tree? It must have been struck by lightning.

My father always reminded us when we were young not to stand under a tree and it is one of the most dangerous places to be in a storm. And we were too young to understand how and what it happen when the lighning strikes.

The reason is – trees protrude from the earth’s surface, making them frequent victims of direct lightning strikes. Electricity seeks the path of least resistance, and the moisture (sap and water) inside a tree is a much better conductor than air. And since water is a better electrical conductor than wood, lightning striking a tree tends to travel just underneath the bark.

The explosive expansion of the lightning’s return stroke will literally blast off the bark, and sometimes some of the wood, along the length of the lightning channel. The result is a visible scar along the trunk of the tree.

So the tree provides a preferred path for lightning to reach ground. If people are standing under the tree during raining and storm occurred, and it will damaged the tree and also will hit and kill people.