Lightning photos

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mike420

Senior Member
Hello everyone,

Its getting close to summer and that means lots of lighting storms here in S Florida. I want to take some photos of the lighting and though i would try using a ND400 with a shutter speed of 30 seconds to start with and work from that. Most would be during the day/evening. If you have any suggestions I'm open to try anything.

Thanks in advance,
Mike
 
M

Mike150

Senior Member
In the daytime, you'll need to get something that will sense the lightning flash and trigger your shutter. I watched a friend do this, (he had a cannon). It worked quite well, but it will sense a flash off to the side so you're still pot luck in aiming the camera. His was by a company called AEO Photo.
 
A

AxeMan - Rick S.

Senior Member
Thanks Jeff. I'm not an expert, but have had many years of trial and error. I WAS avoiding this post because I do not want to promote or encourage this practice but someone dragged my name into it (Jeff) lol, just kidding. So now that the cat's out of the bag, let me start off by saying don't do this, but I know your not going to listen to me so here goes:

The trick to this is adjusting your aperture, there is not going to be one set setting, your going have to learn by looking at your shots to see if you need to adjust up or down. Also your going to need lady luck on your side no two strikes are the same brightness, but you will find a working zone to use. I work with no more than a 20 to 30 second exposures to avoid what I call the Red cast of death. A lot of this should be covered in this thread.

http://nikonites.com/d3000-d5000/1717-help-pleaseee-lightning-shots.html

Post #5 http://nikonites.com/d3000-d5000/1717-help-pleaseee-lightning-shots.html#post10307
 
W

westmill

Banned
Lens speed makes no differance here. Go for outright quality. Stop down to wherever your lens performs at its best.
Use 200 ISO also. A fast 50 prime makes sense, since an F1.8 will peak at around F4.
This means your getting stunning quility at what is still a pretty fast speed.
This is good as long as it rather dark, otherwise your exposures will be shorter, reducincg the chances of catching the lightning.
A good and prob the best method here is set your exposure for 30 seconds and also set your camera and shoot intervals.
Your camera should be capable of simply firing off exposures all day long. You would have to be unlucky for the lightning to strike during
the next exposure lol.
 
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