Lightning Photography

[fx101]

I've really wanted to try this out for a long time, and now that the summer storm season has come I'm willing to give this a try. Other than the obvious safety stuff (i.e. only shoot when the flash to thunder difference is >30s and stuff like that) what can I do to get great shots with a D200? I'm aware that you can either stack ridiculous amounts of ND filters on a lens and continously shoot long exposures until you get something; however, this has the problem that any grass or trees in the image will be blurry due to the wind. My second option is buying a lightning trigger but I'm not sure how good these are. Anybody have any experience with these? Also, how should I meter my shots? I would think that the lightning would cause any metering that my camera did with just the ambient light to yield overexposed images. And lastly... flare. Is this much of a problem?

It seems so daunting and yet the images are downright spectacular when photographed properly.

[WesternGuy]

Try this one, but be aware it comes with sound effects.

http://www.lightningphotography.com/"

Cheers,

WesternGuy

[fx101]

Ah... that's a very helpful site! Thanks!

[deckcadet]

This is great to have as a reference. We've been having some pretty awful weather here but with it has come some spectacular lightning. If I can get my hands on a decent tripod I might try and shoot some this summer.

[fx101]

This is great to have as a reference. We've been having some pretty awful weather here but with it has come some spectacular lightning. If I can get my hands on a decent tripod I might try and shoot some this summer.

Apparently the trick is to find a storm that's at least moderately far away so that the clouds don't blur during your exposure. Also, Deckadet, I believe you have a D3 so you can use the cropped burst at 11fps and it should capture the lightning better than the mere 5.2fps of my D200 if you decide to use the brute force burst method. Tomorrow it's supposed to be really bad weather around here so I'll try it out.