First time shooting lightning.

I went out the other night hoping for some nice sunset photo conditions. The sunset turned out to be a dud, but as I packed up I noticed a summer rain shower in the east so I set back up to at least take some pictures of the dark clouds and sheets of water falling out of the sky. Shorty after the lightning started getting real beatiful.

I learned a couple of things... My camera is not the camera to have for shooting lighting! One thing it does, is for however long you shutter speed is, it has a "processing" time after that that locks up the camera. So with a 4 sec shutter, the best I can do is about 1 shot every 10 seconds. So many strikes were lost because the camera was locked up. Also, even at ISO 64, the noise and artifacts were horrific. So, after about a hundred frames shot, I have a few dramatic photos. These two are thebest, but they both took several hours of post processing to make them look decent. I spent 90% of my time cloning out artifacts. The rest was spent running through noise reduction software.

Here are the fruits of my labor!

Your toil has produced some very dramatic works. I love lightning shots but the only way I've ever been able to catch them is to use my video function, then use video capture software, and although I have caught some nice bolts, none of them compare to the fantastic shots that you have here. Keep up the good work.
Ken

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Originally Posted by bmadau

I went out the other night hoping for some nice sunset photo conditions. The sunset turned out to be a dud, but as I packed up I noticed a summer rain shower in the east so I set back up to at least take some pictures of the dark clouds and sheets of water falling out of the sky. Shorty after the lightning started getting real beatiful.

I learned a couple of things... My camera is not the camera to have for shooting lighting! One thing it does, is for however long you shutter speed is, it has a "processing" time after that that locks up the camera. So with a 4 sec shutter, the best I can do is about 1 shot every 10 seconds. So many strikes were lost because the camera was locked up. Also, even at ISO 64, the noise and artifacts were horrific. So, after about a hundred frames shot, I have a few dramatic photos. These two are thebest, but they both took several hours of post processing to make them look decent. I spent 90% of my time cloning out artifacts. The rest was spent running through noise reduction software.

Here are the fruits of my labor!

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The first one is good enough that anyone would like to have it in their collection.

The second one is great! I really like that one!

Ken- all it takes is patience, time, and a lot of memory (or film). I set myself up on my tripod, at F8 (mostly, but also tried f7.1, but probably should have stayed at F8) ISO64 and around 4 sec shutter (that seemed to work best, but longer shutters may work good too). The 4 sec shutter was a good compromise of capture time vs. processing time on my camera. On a good camera like a DSLR it shouln't be a problem to take longer exposures. Then, I just repeatedly fired away. A soon as the camera was ready to take, I took. Fired away rapidly for about 100frames to get about 6 decent shots. There were so many spectactular strikes that I just barely missed.

Speed- Thanks! Means a lot coming from you!

Nice work there! Lightning is one of the more difficult things to shoot.

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Originally Posted by bmadau

Ken- all it takes is patience, time, and a lot of memory (or film). I set myself up on my tripod, at F8 (mostly, but also tried f7.1, but probably should have stayed at F8) ISO64 and around 4 sec shutter (that seemed to work best, but longer shutters may work good too). The 4 sec shutter was a good compromise of capture time vs. processing time on my camera. On a good camera like a DSLR it shouln't be a problem to take longer exposures. Then, I just repeatedly fired away. A soon as the camera was ready to take, I took. Fired away rapidly for about 100frames to get about 6 decent shots. There were so many spectactular strikes that I just barely missed.

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I took your advice. The other night, a nice lightning storm passed to the north of us and I grabbed my little kodak and headed out. I set up my tripod, set my timer to 4 secs ( which is max for my camera) and started shooting. The second snap I got my first lightning. It is extremely distant, but it is nice an clear, I continued to shoot for about 30 minutes or more and got some nice shots. I played with the zoom and got a couple of other nice shots. One of the biggest problems of course, was the bright light from the multiple strikes, sometimes washed out the bolts, but I will continue to practice and hopefully get some better ones in the future. I will post a couple of the better ones at a later time as they are on a different computer, but I just wanted to thank you for the advice. I also learned another big lesson, don't try to anticipate lightning...just keep shooting. I tried to anticipate and missed some great shots. :(
Ken

We had another big thunderstorm roll through last night. The wife and I thought it'd be fun to take the kids out and watch/shoot the lightning together. Within minutes the storm that was way out there was right over us, pouring rain. I tried the keep the camera under the hatch of our Nissan Xterra but I still couldn't manage to keep the lens dry with the wind and all. We had to come back home and shoot pics from our garage. This time I tried a 13sec shutter, iso 64 and the contrast turn to min to help reduce the noise. We got a few good hits but the view from our garages sucks. We had powerlines and houses all in the way. Still fun practice either way. It's been a good summer for lightning shooting this year!

Glad you got some results, post your pics...