lightning

I'm sat here watching a fantastic lightning display had some forks but mainly sheet now above the clouds , started off yellow ish Amber but now has moved to a nice white / blue so this got me wondering how do you capture lightning?

is it as simple as use record and clip to a shot or is there another method to getting those amazing electric shots?

We are doing the same in Manchester. Not bothering to try and record it. You can buy a lightning trigger for the camera but not really worth the investment in the UK.


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I'm near dukinfield,Hyde literally just started to rain on us this second

I'm actually in Sale. The rain was welcome.


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If it's daytime lightning you need to buy a lightning trigger.

If it's night then you set you focus to the most distant thing you can. Switch the focus to manual once focus is set. I generally try for about a 10-15 second exposure time. I then play with my aperture and ISO so that I can achieve the 10-15 second exposure time.

How to know you have it dialed in? If no lightning goes of then I have a severely underexposed image. If the lightning strikes then I have a much better exposed shot. Give me a moment and I will post up a couple example shots.

Here are two shots. Unedited jpegs straight out of the camera. I shoot raw and jpeg. jpeg because I can scan through images very quickly to find the ones I will want to use, but raw images are the ones I will actually edit. However, a jpeg is more like what you will see on your camera screen.

This image is what I see on my camera when I have no lightning. It's pretty dark. Because I can not get away from the lights that are in the distance I have to be aware of what they are doing in this long exposure to make sure that they are not blowing out the image and the blowout getting larger due to long exposure.


Here is a good lightning strike. The lower lights are not blown out and I have captured the lightning. You can look at the exif data to see me exact settings.


From the storm we had last night I shot over 400 hundred shots. The camera just kept firing away with long exposures because I never knew when a strike would happen. In the end I used 27 photos from that three hour shoot. I only kept 7% and threw away the other 93%.

To take the shot you want to use a remote trigger, wired or wireless. Or, use the cameras timer at 2 seconds.

This is what I put together from all those shots.


Hope that all helped.

Thank you soo much for your post, I have always wondered how to shoot lightning. I will be giving that a try, love the composite picture!