weather photography ???

[f86sabjf]

Hello Everyone

so after last nights round of severe thunderstorms down here in Fla I went out on the back porch and noticed a lot of heat lighting dancing thru the clouds. This turned into several hours of natures fireworks:thumbsup:. So being a newbie to the game what kind of manual settings should i be aiming for to even think about getting some shots??? I currently only have my 2 kit lenses a 18-55 and 55-300 and a Nikon D5100.

[wfooshee]

Well, the spammer brought your thread up, when I missed it before. I assume it's a spammer, when the post has no actual content.

Anyway, I had an evening like that quite some time back. My house is near the end of a street that butts against the bay, and there a walking park right at the water. From the park you're looking west, so I get a lot of nice sunsets there, but this one evening there was distant lightning over the Gulf, nothing between me and the weather, and no weather where I was, yet. I stood there being chewed by bugs for about 45 minutes. I started with a wide-open aperture, ISO 200, exposing 10 seconds at a time. The long-exposure noise reduction then spends ten seconds exposing the sensor to a closed shutter, to subtract that noise from the real exposure. You don't want to turn that off, annoying as it may be to be stuck in that while cool stuff happens.

Anyway, when the first actual lightning I caught looked like this:


I backed the aperture to f:8, and shortened my exposure window to 5 seconds at a time. I just tripped the shutter, waited for the noise reduction cycle, tripped it again, etc. I did not try to trip when I saw lightning. You'll never get it.

This one was at f:8


This is what I got from the first blown-out one with some PP work:



So basically I ended up at f:8, ISO 200, 5 seconds at a time, keep the shutter open as much as possible. Throw away the dark frames.

[f86sabjf]

so you basically just tripped it when it was fininshed exposing and waited to see what would turnout.. I have got to get a tripod . Heat lightning as i call it down here fascinates me

[mjs1973]

I took some lighting shots a couple years ago and did pretty much the same thing that wfooshee did. I set my camera on a tripod and pointed in the direction of the lighting. I played around with my setting a bit, but ended up shooting at ISO 400, f/5.0 for 5 seconds. You should play around with the settings until you get the results you want.

I put the camera on continuous mode, and used a cable release that I could lock the shutter button down with and then went and sat in my truck. Locking the shutter button in continuous mode meant that I didn't have to keep pressing the button after every shot. You will end up with a lot of empty frames, but you should get some keepers too.

Here is a gallery of the keepers I got from that one night.

Lightning

[mattb]

I've done a similar technique to what's been mentioned here already. I actually just ordered a lightning trigger so I can do daytime lightning shots so I'm excited to try that once it and some storms arrive. I like a wide lens to capture a lot of the sky. I can then crop it down as needed later.
Here's a couple from my porch.

Both Pentax K-x, Pentax DA 15mm f/4
10s f/8 ISO100


30s f/9.5 ISO100

[f86sabjf]

this is going to be one fun summer . Thanks for all the ideas and begining settings to try

[gryphonslair99]

Food for thought.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjI8AxZnrx8

[f86sabjf]

dont worry about that . I was born and raised in the lighting capitol of the world Florida

[JoWee]

Oh, my, so amazing photos, it is rather hard to catch the lightning

[Blandar]

Hello! I also do photography and I like to take photos in different places. Of course, I travel around the world and sometimes the systems are really different. I always have to convert 100 f to c just to understand the weather in the place I work. It helps me to create a look, mood and message of my shooting