In this tutorial I am going to show you how to take a picture of lightning. It is actually not very difficult once you know how and you have the right equipment. With a small amount of preparation you can get some fantastic results.

So lets begin!

Equipment

• Camera capable of manual control
• tripod
• remote shutter release

Method

The first thing you need to do is check the weather! There are lots of great apps and websites out there so just look for one that works best for the area you live in and wait for the bad weather to show up. Once you have your bad weather you want to consider what kind of photo you are taking. Just pointing your camera at the sky is boring. If you have a composition with some interest in it the picture will be much more exciting. Of course sometimes you just end up somewhere and you need to make do with your surroundings.
So setup your gear and frame the image you want in the view finder and get your settings dialled in. What you want to do here is shoot an exposure of at least a couple seconds. You want the lightning to flash during your exposure, similar to the method of light painting. At night this is easier as you just expose for your surroundings, which is normally enough. But if its lighter out then lower your ISO as much as you can and lower you aperture as much as you need to to achieve that minimum 2 sec exposure.

The longer the exposure the easier it is to catch a bolt of lighting!

Then you just want to keep shooting and shooting. A longer exposure makes it easier to catch a bolt of lightning and takes fewer shots. An intervalometer is best as you can just leave your camera to do its job until the storm is over and all you need to do is review your images.

I did not use one, I kept shooting with the shutter release so that I could tweak settings in between exposures if I needed to.

^{f/7.1 ISO 400, 15sec @ 24mm}

^{f/5.6 ISO 400, 20sec @ 24mm}

Not every shot will be a winner but you will get a great series of shots, its really up to nature at this point. Check these out that I got. I have included the exposure data beneath each one so you can see how I shot them. As you will notice, I was using 20 second exposures. This meant I even had the chance to get several lightning bolts in the one shot.

^{f/9.0 ISO400, 20sec @ 24mm}

^{f/5.6 ISO 200, 20sec @ 24mm}

Post Processing

Once you have your shots you can import them into your favourite photo editor, for me it’s lightroom. I didn’t do much to the photos, I adjusted the color temperature to make it cooler. The street lights give an orange glow that I don’t like and this gets rid of that. Then I adjusted the highlights and shadows to the levels I like (experiment with this stuff to find the look you like for your images), then pumped in a little clarity and boosted the sharpness.

^{f/5.6 ISO 200, 20sec @ 24mm}

Extra Drama

If you want to make your image a bit more dramatic you can then take your photos into photoshop and stack them in layers and blend using lighten or overlay or whichever other blend mode works best in the circumstances, these two options are usually the ones you want.

Here I stacked 3 of the best lightning images I took to create a more dramatic and angry lightning scene.

Now go out there and give it a try for yourself! Um…. weather permitting of course!

Disclaimer:
You aren’t guaranteed to get a shot, if you aim your camera somewhere and the lightning just happens not to strike in that direction, you are out of luck. Better luck next time.

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Thanks for Looking.
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