James Langford
EF4
I wrote up this small tutorial for another thread, and thought I would post it here to help others out. You can see my lightning shots on my site listed in my sig below. Here's my general strategy for shooting lightning:
* Shoot with a tripod and remote control.
* If your shot includes any bright lights (like cities, etc) and if you have a DLSR, use Mirror Lock Up to avoid any motion blur in longer exposures. This makes a huge difference, IMO.
* Find a location with interesting foreground (city, trees, lake, etc)
* Use a wide angle lens to capture more of the interest of the storm
* Determine the movement of the storm so you know where best to point your camera
* Always shoot at ISO 100 for the least amount of noise. There are very few times that I will break this rule. In very rare occassions you may want to increase your ISO if the lightning is very very faint, or to control the scene.
* Shoot in Manual Mode so you can control the shutter and aperature.
* Pre-focus your camera before starting to shoot (I generally use infinity for lightning type shots) using Manual focus. Don't trust your auto focus, especially in dark scenes. Lock your camera in Manual focus so the focus won't change.
* Normally you can use auto White Balance and get good results. I shoot in RAW, so it's easy for me to adjust the WB after the fact. You can set the White Balance for whatever type of scene you are using, and the lightning will still look good.
* Use the brightness of the lightning to determine your F-Stop. If the lightning is very bright, F16. If not so bright, F8. If very dim then F4 or lower. I think for almost all of the shots above I shot around F8.
* Expose the scene at your given FStop by changing the shutter speed. Take a few practice shots till your scene looks good WITHOUT the lightning. Then when you get a strike, everything in the overall scene will look good.
* If you are shooting a very black scene, you could consider using "Bulb" mode on a DSLR if you have a remote. This will allow you to manually open and close the shutter for strikes. However, anything longer than 30 seconds or so will start to introduce bad noise and hot spots on most cameras.
* Another thing to think about is using an Intervalometer type remote control, or something to do Time Lapse. I have one of these for my Canon's, and just set it to repeatedly take shots one after the other.
* Just keep shooting! Digital is cheap, right?
I generally just take one pic after the other without stopping. If you have a camera with Noise Reduction, you'll have to wait till that is done to take your next picture.
Hope this helps!
James
* Shoot with a tripod and remote control.
* If your shot includes any bright lights (like cities, etc) and if you have a DLSR, use Mirror Lock Up to avoid any motion blur in longer exposures. This makes a huge difference, IMO.
* Find a location with interesting foreground (city, trees, lake, etc)
* Use a wide angle lens to capture more of the interest of the storm
* Determine the movement of the storm so you know where best to point your camera
* Always shoot at ISO 100 for the least amount of noise. There are very few times that I will break this rule. In very rare occassions you may want to increase your ISO if the lightning is very very faint, or to control the scene.
* Shoot in Manual Mode so you can control the shutter and aperature.
* Pre-focus your camera before starting to shoot (I generally use infinity for lightning type shots) using Manual focus. Don't trust your auto focus, especially in dark scenes. Lock your camera in Manual focus so the focus won't change.
* Normally you can use auto White Balance and get good results. I shoot in RAW, so it's easy for me to adjust the WB after the fact. You can set the White Balance for whatever type of scene you are using, and the lightning will still look good.
* Use the brightness of the lightning to determine your F-Stop. If the lightning is very bright, F16. If not so bright, F8. If very dim then F4 or lower. I think for almost all of the shots above I shot around F8.
* Expose the scene at your given FStop by changing the shutter speed. Take a few practice shots till your scene looks good WITHOUT the lightning. Then when you get a strike, everything in the overall scene will look good.
* If you are shooting a very black scene, you could consider using "Bulb" mode on a DSLR if you have a remote. This will allow you to manually open and close the shutter for strikes. However, anything longer than 30 seconds or so will start to introduce bad noise and hot spots on most cameras.
* Another thing to think about is using an Intervalometer type remote control, or something to do Time Lapse. I have one of these for my Canon's, and just set it to repeatedly take shots one after the other.
* Just keep shooting! Digital is cheap, right?

Hope this helps!
James