It seems impossible. It’s
a lot easier than you think. You only need a bit of knowledge, and you’ll be
good to go.
You will need camera
that allows you to take bulb exposures.
Use an ISO of between 100-400
nut no higher as you will have too fast shutter times and also you will end up
with too much noise (Grain).
Whilst in bulb mode, you
can decide when you want to close the shutter by pressing the shutter button a
second time. Or just be simply releasing the shutter after desired time is achieved.
If you have a
point-and-shoot, you might be out of luck. Sorry.
You’re just trying to
keep your shutter open long enough to “catch” the lightning. Once the lightning
strike has occurred, you can close the shutter and keep your picture.
Various atmospheric light sources, such as street lights, can crowd out the
lightning strikes , so capturing at night is a good option or the use of a NDfilter may help in the day light.
You will need a tripod
also. This is not a matter of choice, really. You need the tripod in order to
keep everything else in the image from blurring.
If it looks like it’s going to rain, you’ll
also need a plastic bag to cover everything except your camera’s lens.
The idea is to leave the
shutter open for long enough to capture a lightning strike, but not long enough
that too much light creeps into your camera and the whole image looks white.
When you are setup, take a few test shots first (even without capturing a
lightning bolt) and work out how long you can leave the shutter open without
ruining the photo. This is usually between 5 and 30 seconds depending on the
amount of ambient light around.
There are certain white balance settings that tend to work better for photographing lightning. It
doesn’t matter if you are using a digital SLR or a point-and-shoot, fluorescent
white balance is your mode of choice. This will give the sky a purplish sort of
tinge that will make your lightning photography much more colourful and far
more interesting.
The best images come when you meter the f-stop
for the available light, not the lightning. This means that if you’re in a city
you will want to pick out the brightest source of light and the dimmest source
of light then try to get somewhere safe in the middle. The whole trick of
photographing lightning is to balance the image for the natural light.
This is only a brief post but I hope it goes some way to helping catch a exiting subject.
Written by Paul Hemming
@ BIG WORLD PICTURE DOT COM
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