Posted: 6/15/2009 7:01:36 PM EDT
| I have a Canon EOS Rebel XS. I've got an 18-55mm lens and a 75-300mm lens. I have a good tripod also. Any tips on getting started? Thanks in advance. |
| lucking out on a lightning storm for starters. ive taken some lightning shots but nothing spectacular. of course a really long exposure at a high iso will give you a fair amount of noise which will be very obvious against a night sky. finding a very active lightning storm will help being that you exposures wont be too long. make sure your tripod is out of the wind and use the timer or a remote for the shutter. set a reasonably long exposure and hope for some luck. sorry i cant be of more help but i dont have a lot of practice with lightning pics. |
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Previous poster points out the semi-random nature of this kind of photography. When photographing lightening, it's always better to be lucky than good. However, it doesn't hurt to be good. I used to do a lot of this with film cameras back in the pre-digital days, and it's true that if you leave the shutter open too long you'll get noise. With film, it used to be called reciprocity failure; I don't know what the digital version is called. Essentially, you have to think about what kind of exposure time you'll need to catch a bolt, and set your exposure to take a reasonable exposure using that shutter speed. This is because you have to have a background to your picture or you just have a big jagged white thing with no reference. So, if you find a storm that's popping every 15 seconds (for example, it might be 30 sec., or a minute or more), you set your camera so it will record a dark background at that shutter speed. If you catch lightning, it will act like a big flash and brighten it up. Then, just make exposures when you think a bolt might be forthcoming and hope for the best. In the old days you could waste a lot of film doing this; at least nowadays it's just bits on a chip. And with film cameras, you could just use the bulb setting, stopped way down, and expose until you got a bolt in the frame or a couple of minutes had passed and reciprocity would ruin the exposure, at which point you wrote that one off and advanced to a new frame. I know that sounds a bit vague and random, but you'll just have to put in some time to get a feel for things and what I've said will make sense. |
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Exposure is the most important part, the rest is luck. You can take good lightning photos with a cheap point and shoot camera as well as a nice DSLR, but you have to know how to set the exposure. Steps to set up the camera: 1. Turn off the automatic Hotpixel eliminating extra exposure. It might be called just about anything on your camera, but it shoots a 2nd picture of blackness automatically, and then subtracts any hotpixels automatically. Turn it OFF! 2. Set the camera to do a 2 second self timed delay, or else use a cable release. 3. Turn off/disable the flash 4. Turn off Autofocus 5. Set the camera to Manual mode 6. Set the aperture to something like f/11. 7. Set the ISO to ISO 200 or so. 7b. If you are shooting JPEG, make sure your white balance is set to sunny/flash to start out. That should keep the lightning white, and make most of the artificial lighting yellowish. 8. Set the lens to shoot at or very near infinity. Sometimes the infinity stop isn't accurate, so try it out before shooting in the dark! 9. Set the shutter speed to a time of about 15 seconds for starters and shoot a frame. Hopefully you will get a pretty dark picture but not totally dark. If there is a city, ocean, mountain, whatever in your view, make sure it is exposed OK. Obviously you don't want the scene to be bright as day, but on the other hand, you want the scene to be lit a reasonable amount. If it is too bright, dial it back to 8 seconds, and if it is too dim, increase the shutter speed to 30 seconds. If there is a lot of lightning, you may get smaller flashes in your test images. That's OK, just work them into your scene. Once you are ready to start taking pictures: 10. Set your tripod up. 11. Start shooting pics. When one is done, shoot another. You only want to miss a couple seconds between shots at the most. The self timer prevents the camera from moving when you hit the shutter button. 12. Shoot a bunch of pics, and don't stop when you think you have a good one. Keep going! 13. Monitor your results as your pictures appear on the LCD. If they are turning out too bright/dim/discolored/whatever, make the necessary corrections on the fly. 14. When the show is over, or you are out of batteries, or else it starts pouring on you, go inside and screen through your images, getting rid of any that don't show anything special. |
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Quoted:
Exposure is the most important part, the rest is luck. You can take good lightning photos with a cheap point and shoot camera as well as a nice DSLR, but you have to know how to set the exposure. Steps to set up the camera: 1. Turn off the automatic Hotpixel eliminating extra exposure. It might be called just about anything on your camera, but it shoots a 2nd picture of blackness automatically, and then subtracts any hotpixels automatically. Turn it OFF! 2. Set the camera to do a 2 second self timed delay, or else use a cable release. 3. Turn off/disable the flash 4. Turn off Autofocus 5. Set the camera to Manual mode 6. Set the aperture to something like f/11. 7. Set the ISO to ISO 200 or so. 7b. If you are shooting JPEG, make sure your white balance is set to sunny/flash to start out. That should keep the lightning white, and make most of the artificial lighting yellowish. 8. Set the lens to shoot at or very near infinity. Sometimes the infinity stop isn't accurate, so try it out before shooting in the dark! 9. Set the shutter speed to a time of about 15 seconds for starters and shoot a frame. Hopefully you will get a pretty dark picture but not totally dark. If there is a city, ocean, mountain, whatever in your view, make sure it is exposed OK. Obviously you don't want the scene to be bright as day, but on the other hand, you want the scene to be lit a reasonable amount. If it is too bright, dial it back to 8 seconds, and if it is too dim, increase the shutter speed to 30 seconds. If there is a lot of lightning, you may get smaller flashes in your test images. That's OK, just work them into your scene. Once you are ready to start taking pictures: 10. Set your tripod up. 11. Start shooting pics. When one is done, shoot another. You only want to miss a couple seconds between shots at the most. The self timer prevents the camera from moving when you hit the shutter button. 12. Shoot a bunch of pics, and don't stop when you think you have a good one. Keep going! 13. Monitor your results as your pictures appear on the LCD. If they are turning out too bright/dim/discolored/whatever, make the necessary corrections on the fly. 14. When the show is over, or you are out of batteries, or else it starts pouring on you, go inside and screen through your images, getting rid of any that don't show anything special. +1 Only difference I can see in what I do, is use a remote shutter release to automatically trip the shutter each time so I'm constantly taking photos without having the keep pushing the button. 
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Quoted:
Lightning pics = incredible. Hats off to anyone that can successfully do it. its not really that hard. every storm I've ever shot, I've got some pretty good pics. Maybe I just get lucky. All of these are taken with a Nikon D70S in manual mode, around F/11, Bulb shutter release, ISO 200, corded remote, and on a tripod (except for the last 2) Here are my first ever shots of lightning taken in May 2006 in Camas Washington 
These were taken July 3 2006 also in Camas WA 
ETA: lol, I was slowly making it under my garage as the the storm was coming closer and it began to rain 
and finally, these were taken a few weeks ago at Hill AFB Utah 
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