Attempt to capture lightning

WHAT

This is a series of lightning strikes from a recent thunderstorm taken from the safety of my carport. I'm not saying this photograph is spectacular example by any means, but it was my first attempt at capturing lightning with a camera.

WHY

If I had a 'bucket list' describing all the photographs I someday want to take, a lightning strike would definitely be on that list. I had always assumed lightning would be a difficult subject to capture and have always admired photographs of storms and mad weather. Therefore, when I heard the thunder rolling around my house last night, I ducked outside and saw a chance to capture some of the light show.

HOW

I set up my tripod at the edge of my carport with the camera facing the general direction I had seen the lightning coming from. I was careful to ensure that if it started to rain the lens would still have sufficient cover from the roof of the carport.

I then set my camera to 'Manual' mode and spun the dial through all the various shutter speeds until it displayed 'BULB'.

(The bulb setting basically means you have total control over how long the shutter remains open. The longest shutter speed available on my camera is 30 seconds which isn't very long when you're trying to capture the smallest flicker of light in a pitch black sky).

I used an aperture of f/22 and a remote cable release to prevent me having to hold down the shutter release during the entire exposure.

Initially I had the camera pointed directly at the sky where the storm was occurring, however the camera wasn't able to focus on anything because it was so black. I tried switching to manual focus mode to save the camera trying to focus lock onto something that wasn't there but because it was so dark through the viewfinder, I found I wasn't really sure I was going to be focused correctly should any lightning grace me with its presence.

To counter the focus problem, I switched back to auto-focus and then tilted my camera down so that some trees across the road from my house were now in the lower part of the frame, giving the camera a target to focus on.

I then pressed the button and waited for a bunch of lightning to come. This image was a 43 second exposure - don't ask me why 43 seconds, it just seemed long enough as I had seen a few 'episodes' of lightning during that time in the general area my camera was pointing at.

Because this shot was taken in suburbia and there was some ambient street light, I didn't want to overexpose the image by leaving the shutter open for too long. Most of the shots I took that night were exposed for about 1 minute.

POST PRODUCTION

In photoshop, I opened the image as a RAW file and increased the following:

contrast, fill light, clarity and increased the 'lights/highlights' to make the lightning itself stand out more.