Rainy Lightning

It's been a few weeks since I've posted a lightning photo, so here's another one, taken through a sheet of rain. As with almost all my lightning shots, this was taken from my yard. If you're interested in how I get my lightning shots, read the end of the post.

And that's my Skywatch Friday entry for the week.

I often get questions on how I get my lightning shots. It has nothing to do with good equipment or timing - here's how you do it.

1. Most importantly, stay safe. Most of the time, the lightning is in the distance for my photos, but a telephoto lens or cropping make it seem much closer. Remember, lightning kills, something we're reminded of literally every year where I live.

2. Live in a place that gets lots of thunderstorms. It's typical for us to get 40 or more days with thunderstorms a year, and a good year can have 60 or more days. Some of these days will have several thunderstorms. Preferably a good view helps - we have views on three sides of our house. This is the most difficult part of the whole process!

3. Timing has nothing to do with it - unless you're superhuman, you can't react quickly enough to lightning to capture it. Once it's flashed and you've reacted, it's already gone. You'll be taking long exposures and hoping for lightning in the capture; the one above was a 20-second exposure. If your camera has a bulb setting (i.e. one that allows you to press the remote once to start the exposure and again to end it, without presetting the length), use this, as you'll usually want to end it after a good flash, and you can't predict how long this will be. I find that using ISO 100 and an aperture within a couple of stops of 8, something between 15 and 60 seconds usually gives me a good result depending on the ambient light and the closeness of the lightning bolt, but you'll have to experiment. This is assuming night-time photography; during the daytime, you'll almost certainly need a neutral density filter to darken the photo and allow you to take long exposures, or lots of luck. (I had both when I captured lightning hitting a nearby tree.)

4. Because you're taking such long exposures you'll need a tripod. Mine is a cheap tripod, but it works fine. If you're on a tripod and your camera works with a cordless remote, that's worth getting - the remote for my old Nikon D40X costs less than eating one meal out with my wife.

5. Take the photos on the highest-quality mode, since you'll be cropping almost all of them. I use the free program GIMP to crop (and also sometimes sharpen them too).

Good luck! And remember the first item, stay safe.