How to photograph lightning/
I often get asked how I captured this image above, the lightning bolt is frozen perfectly in the frame! Today, I'm here to tell you it's easier than it looks. Now without going over too much of the basics of photography we have to use things such as the ISO, Shutter Speed, and f Stop to understand how this picture was taken.
This lighting storm happened a few weeks ago in Florida and it was around 11pm. That means that there is very little light out for the camera to take in, which means the Shutter Speeds will be very long requiring a Tripod.
- Make sure to steady your camera and watch the sky for a group of storm clouds.
- set your camera and angle it towards the storm,
- open up the f Stop in order to make sure more of the image is in focus at once,
- you can use an ISO anywhere from 650-1000 and maybe higher when the situation calls for.
But you want to keep the ISO as low as possible to reduce noise (film grain) on the final image. For the lighting shot above the ISO was set at 1000, f Stop at 20 and the shutter speed open for 25 seconds. The shutter is left open for such a long time in order for the lightning to strike and capture the light it creates. A tripod and timer come in handy.
A good trick I found is to look through your camera's timer settings and set it to take multiple photos in a row. This is useful to capture striking images and even combine them in programs such as Photoshop. A setting in my camera tells the camera to take 5 images, in a row 2 second apart each at the ISO f Stop and Shutter time I set it to. In this case, it was 25 seconds per image. There are many other creative uses for this trick so go out and take your own storm photos.
