Tesla coil photography

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Original poster: "Michael Strube" <mjstrube@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>

I recently completed a photography project that some list members might find
useful. As you know, a common discussion topic on the list is how best to
photograph coils and the advice is usually some combination of low f stops,
long shutter speeds, and low ISO. I suspect that for those first trying to
photograph their coils the experience can still be a bit frustrating. I
decided to investigate this a bit more thoroughly with an eye toward
exploring the boundary conditions for these settings and their combinations.
Using the manual settings on my Sony Cyber-shot digital camera, I took
images of my coil under a wide range of settings (ISO 100 and 400, f stops
between f2.1 and f8.0, shutter speeds between 1 s and 8 s), under both dark
and low light conditions. I've organized the results into 9 pdf files that
allow a fairly easy way to see the effects of changing the settings, at
least for the Sony Cyber-shot. Some of the files contain full views of the
coil that show how the settings affect overall exposure and the capture of
streamer behavior. These images, however, are reduced to 20% of their
original size to keep the files manageable. Consequently, they hide a bit
the graininess that can be a problem at some settings. Other files show
cropped portions of the images at their full resolution and show quite well
the problem with graininess. Results are probably similar for other digital
cameras, at least to the extent they share similar technology, but
definitely do not extend to analog cameras (one of the files shows an
"apples to apples" comparison with my Canon AE-1).

The files can be found at:

http://hot-streamer.com/temp/MichaelStrube/

The beginning part of each file contains a complete description of camera,
setting, and coil specifications.