First time shooting lightning.

[Ultra Magnus]

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!

[ken1953]

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

[Speed]

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!

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!

[Ultra Magnus]

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!

[Axle]

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

[ken1953]

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.

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

[Ultra Magnus]

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...