I'm a huge lover of storms and anything storm related. So obviously, I love lightning! From a distance of course... No self barbeque here, thank you! The other night there was a pretty big storm passing through here in Concord, and the lightning was just spectacular. So, me being a lover of both photography and lightning, I just had to combine them both! It was a great experience, and I plan on doing it again very soon. I think it's probably been the most enjoyable form of photography I've tried yet!
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| Lightning streaks |
Want to take some lightning shots of your own?
It's not that difficult.
What you'll need:
1) Camera - DSLR or Point and shoot that allows the ability to manually control shutter speed
2) Tripod - A solid, stable tripod is best. Those $25 tripods just don't usually cut it.
3) Remote shutter release or the in-camera ability to trigger the shutter release a couple seconds after the button is pressed - This insures that there won't be any camera shake from pressing the shutter release button.
4) Some way to keep your gear out of the rain! I'd normally use a rain cover for my camera, but this time I just stood on the balcony of my apartment building.
5) Patience - You're going to be taking a lot of exposures that aren't going to have any lightning in them at all. Just keep shooting.
- The gear I used:
1) Canon 550d/T2i
2) Quantaray Tripod "Still saving for that great manfrotto"
3) Wired remote shutter release "Allowed me to both trigger the shutter remotely, as well as hold it down for however long I wanted the exposure to be"
4) Tamron 17-50 F/2.8 lens "At a focal length of 17mm to capture as much of the scene as I could"
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| Lightning strikes |
Alright, now on to the technical details:
I started off seeing what shutter speed I would need to expose for the
street lights at an aperture of F/8 and ISO of 100. 15-17 seconds ended up
being about right. But since the lightning is just a quick exposure over
the whole frame, F/8 wasn't capturing enough light from the lightning.
So I decided to switch my aperture to F/5.6 and see what I would get.
With shutter speeds between 8-10 seconds, my exposure was good for both
the lightpoles and the lightning, so that's what I stuck with.
So a quick recap:
- Aperture of F/5.6 "I wanted to make sure my foreground was somewhat in focus as well".
- Shutter speed of 8-10 seconds "Plenty of time to capture the lightning in it's fullest, but it still gave me enough leeway that I could expose for a few more seconds if there was still a light show going on up there.
- ISO of 100 "I could have easily gone up as far as 400 without worrying about noise, but for a situation where I was already expecting lengthy shutter speeds to capture the complete lighting strikes, I knew it wasn't necessary.
I captured about 180 images total, most of which didn't have any
lightning in them. That's one of the big
things when it comes to
lightning photography, you keep those exposures going over and over
again, whether there's lightning or not, just in hopes of getting some
in there. Another thing I noticed: a lot of the individual bolts of
lightning that are just slightly visible in the photograph, I never seen
with my own eyes. I'm not sure if the main strikes just took up so much of my attention that I didn't see them, or if they just weren't visible to me. Either way, I think I walked away from this with some pretty decent shots!
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| Lightning filled sky |
If you'd like to view the rest of the images from this photo session, feel free to follow the link below.
