Just bought a Nikon D200, have a question...

[Mark Farnik]

Hello everyone
I just snagged a sweet deal a couple weeks back. A friend of mine in Fort Morgan who is an ex professional photographer upgraded to a Fuji S5 DSLR and no longer had any use for his Nikon D200, which he had only used for 9 months before he upgraded to the S5. For the ridiculously low price of $1600, I got the following:
-Nikon D200 body
-Nikkor AF 24-120 mm lens
-Nikkor AF 50 mm fixed lens
-Promaster Neutral Density filter
-Quantaray Circular Polarizer
-Digital Field Guide to D200
-D200 Training DVD
-3 extra Nikon EN-EL3 batteries
-Lowepro Trim Trekker photo backpack
-3 year Mack warranty
All together the equipment is worth about $3k, but since I'm just getting started, he sold everything to me for basically half price. It was a helluva deal no matter how you look at it.
I had to take out a loan from my parents to make the purchase, but buisness is picking up and I figure I'll be able to pay them back by the end of the summer.
The camera is awesome. It is massively more complicated than my D70S, that's for sure. This is a true professional camera, and the learning curve on this camera is quite long and large, but I'm patient. I've only had it a few weeks and have already captured some very stunning images. 10 megapixels and 5 fps is a thing of beauty...
Now, I have a major question about this camera:
HOW DO YOU SHOOT LIGHTNING WITH IT?!?
The other night I was out shooting lightning. Given it was pitch black, I had it set to Bulb, f14 and ISO 200. There were several very bright cg's that struck only a few miles away from me, and yet all the camera recorded was blackness! I played with the settings for two hours the other night and was not able to record a single lightning shot, which was extremely frustrating and exasperating. I never had this type of issue with my D70S when it came to taking lightning photos. I realize the D200 is a much more complicated piece of equipment and I'm just learning the basic functions as we speak, but for crying out loud...
I'm very confused. Where did I go wrong? What settings should I be using to successfully capture lightning with this camera?
Any advice or assistance is wanted and appreciated!

 

[Gaetan Cormier]

I had it set to Bulb, f14 and ISO 200. There were several very bright cg's that struck only a few miles away from me, and yet all the camera recorded was blackness!

This might sound stupid but.... did you take off the lens cap?

Sometimes we forget things like that... the other day I was shooting the construction of a new soccer stadium here in Montreal and I mostly shoot with the screen turned off to save as much as possible on batteries and guess what? My SD card was in the comfort of my computer at home

 

[Greg Campbell]

LOL, maybe it wasn't such a sweet deal after all!

Is f14? a typo? Try f/6.7~8 at ISO 200. 30 seconds of shutter time should record plenty of sky brightness. If the picture is black, something is very wrong.

Make sure you really are in full manual mode, and that the shutter is staying open for the duration of the photograph. Pull the lens and observe.

Start your night time photography with a relatively bright city scape. You should see something....


Pixel-shmixel.... I'm about to pop for a 6x7 medium format system. Yea, it will shoot that old 'film' stuff!

-Moo

 

[Khristian Snyder]

Do you have a cable release. If your shooting bulb, you either have to hold the shutter open by hand or use a cable release to lock it open.

If you dont have one, the drop then open up your apurture more and try a 30 second exposure. And be sure to use a tripod!

 

[Mark Farnik]

Gaetan: Yes, I had the lens cap off. I've done that once or twice, so I always check to make sure the lens cap is off.
Greg: The f14... I have no idea why I was shooting with that. I was mostly attempting to shoot between f5.6 and f8. I've shot a cityscape at night with it and it did fine, which is why I'm scratching my head as to why it didn't capture the lightning.
Khristian: I was doing it old school- holding the shutter open by hand. It sounds stupid, but I managed to capture plenty of spectacular lightning shots with my old 35 mm Pentax K1000 and more recently my Nikon D70S holding the shutter open by hand. I've developed an extremely steady hand this way. I'm going to spring for the Nikon cable release here in a week or so. And yes, I had it mounted on a tripod. My $120 aluminum pistol grip head Manfrotto, nonetheless.

I'm going to play around with it tonight and see if I can figure out if it's me that's doing something wrong or if there is something screwed up in the camera. I'm thinking it's me, as this is the only issue I have encountered with this camera, everything else works perfectly.

 

[Mike Hollingshead]

http://www.stormtrack.org/forum/showthread.php?t=11338

F14 would be the problem.

 

[Mike Umscheid]

Hi Mark, as a D200 owner myself, I will say that once you get a handle of that camera... you'll love it to death. It's certainly a "poor man's" professional level DSLR if you will. I really made no adjustments in shooting style after shooting lightning with the D70...same techniques pretty much. Here's a lightning shot from a chase a month ago. I think in this one I was at F/8, and that was a pretty bright CG flash. I don't think I have ever shot lightning at anything more closed down than F/11. I think for the really close, bright "stacatto" type flashes, F/11 would be about as closed down on the aperture as you would want to be. If the lightning is not bright and/or more distant... you just won't see anything at all at F/14. When it comes to lightning photography, the aperature is really important and a lot of times is guess work/intuition when out in the field depending on how close/bright the lightning is.

 

[Hank Baker]

How long did you leave the shutter button depressed? How long was your expsure?

 

[William Coyle]

Hank you have a very good camera and one of the best that I have owned since I have been shooting. I dont want to answer for Mike but by the looks of his exp time I would say about 10-20 seconds but I could be wrong. The picture below were shot with a Nikon D200 and a Nikon 17-55mm 2.8 lens...Enjoy the camera...William