Lightning is one of the hardest subjects to capture on film, but it doesn’t have to be. With a few simple settings, some patience and a bit of luck anyone can get great photos.
If you’ve ever tried to photograph lightning before you know that it is very hard to time your shutter just right, and if you keep trying you end up trying to anticipate the lightning. That’s close to how you actually do it, but not quite. The trick to getting great lightning photos, like the ones I’ve included in this article, is to set up for very long exposures.
If you watch where the lightning is most active, you can focus on that area and if your exposure is long enough you will usually capture something while the shutter is open. However, if that’s all you do then you run the risk of overexposing your image and nobody likes that.
You need to realize that lightning is very bright. Duh, you know that! But lightning is so bright that even if you make your camera as insensitive to light as you can, it will still show up quite well. My approach to photographing lightning takes advantage of this incredible brightness.
When I want to capture lightning I set my ISO to a very low value (80-100) and choose the largest f-number I can (which will result in the smallest aperture). I choose the small aperture to allow less light to fall on the sensor, further decreasing the light sensitivity of my camera.
Once you have this set properly, you have to get your focus. Lightning strikes are generally far away — if they’re not then get inside! — being so far away, you want your focus set to infinity, but you don’t want to have to keep setting the focus once you have it; it can be a real pain at night. If you have city lights nearby, you can use the auto-focus to get your focus from them and then turn on manual focus to lock it in.
Now you have to get lucky. You’ll want to use a tripod and a remote if you have one. If you don’t have a remote you can set a delay so you don’t shake the camera at the start of the exposure. You’ll want an exposure of around 30 seconds. Just keep taking pictures. Eventually you will get lightning to strike during one of the 30 second windows. Don’t just stop with one; I recommend getting lots of pictures before calling it a night because you never know what shape the lightning will take and you’ll want a lot to choose from when you are done.
I recommend avoiding Photoshop if you can at this point. Photoshop is great, but these pictures won’t need much tweaking… maybe a slight color correction if your white-balance was slightly off. The only thing I do recommend for post-processing is to reduce the noise if you have a lot in your images. Generally, shooting in a low ISO shouldn’t generate much noise, but if it does it’s a pretty simple fix.
If you take an exposure with the same settings as your other pictures, but with the lens cap on you’ll get what’s called a dark frame. Insert this dark frame as a new layer in Photoshop with the blending mode set to difference and you’ll see a lot of the noise vanish. That’s it. Don’t do anything else…except maybe a smart sharpen. If you play too much with the lightning photos you won’t be happy with the results. Simplicity, really is the key here.
If you try this out let me know how it works for you. I’d love to see what you can capture and I wish you luck in your photographic endeavors!