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!