How do you take a picture of lightning?

Answer 1

Lightning photosThe best photos of lightning are taken at night time. This is an advantage because you can take very long exposures without over-exposing. Make sure that you have a tripod and a camera that allows you to set up manual settings. A remote trigger is a great advantage. When a thunder storm approaches, set yourself up in a nice dry advantage point and get ready to shoot.

In my experience, 110 photos resulted in 3 excellent photos of lightning and another particularly violent-looking one. (every other photo was obviously very black.) Each photo was taken with between 10s and 20s exposure, and I left the aperture mid-way. The lightening itself is overexposed - of course, but try to make sure that the city lights (or the silhouette of the landscape) are clear. Using digital is a serious advantage for the amateur because one can see their results immediately and there is no expensive mistake of taking a full film of underexposed frames.

Answer 2

I'm no expert, so I could be entirely wrong, but my guess is that the best way to photograph lightning isn't to take a picture, but to run a high-speed video camera during a storm. To get the photograph, you just find one of the frames of the film with a really good shot of the lightning.

Or, you could just snap pictures randomly during a storm and maybe you'll get lucky! But I don't think the shutter on a conventional camera would be fast enough to capture an image of lightning.