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[btaylor]

A couple from tonight, amazing storm! Haven't seen anything like it for a very long time.


Mount Isa Electrical Storm by Ben__Taylor, on Flickr


Lit up by Ben__Taylor, on Flickr

[Raid]

A couple from tonight, amazing storm! Haven't seen anything like it for a very long time.


Mount Isa Electrical Storm by Ben__Taylor, on Flickr


Lit up by Ben__Taylor, on Flickr

Ben

Great shots, would it be possible to supply the settings. I have attempted lightning many times all with poor results, any help would be appreciated.

[btaylor]

Ben

Great shots, would it be possible to supply the settings. I have attempted lightning many times all with poor results, any help would be appreciated.

Absolutely!

To be honest getting a shot of lightning starts with a bit of trial and error, once you get it all dialled in though it's quite easy from there. I was very lucky last night as there was a ridiculous amount of activity in the sky.

The way I try to do things is to use shutter speed to expose the scene using the ambient/available light and use both ISO and aperture to control the exposure of the lightning.

For the first shot I was at ISO 160, 13sec exposure and I'm pretty sure it was f/8.0. Because the Samyang 14mm is manual aperture and doesn't read back to the camera I don't know for certain, however I was generally sliding between f/8.0 and f/11. If there's a lot of ambient light and you don't want too much movement in the clouds etc you can speed up your exposure a bit down to, say, 5sec for example. You should still be exposing correctly for the lightning as before since ISO and aperture have the biggest effect on that component of the shot.

For the bottom shot (with the fire in the background) I was shooting at ISO 400 for a 30sec exposure and again at around f/8.0 to f/11. I had the ISO bumped up here as the lightning was much further away and hence needed the extra sensitivity to expose the lightning correctly. This could also be achieved through opening up the aperture a bit. For the foreground here I was simply light painting with a torch.

So once you get your settings where you want them, just sit it on a tripod with a remote shutter release and let it keep ticking over.

Not exactly too scientific but hopefully this gives you a decent starting point.

edit: SHOOT RAW