How to Capture Lightning

(Disclaimer: Lightning will kill you. I am not advising anyone to go out in an electrical storm. This is a descriptive post about how I take lightning images and the techniques that I use. Be smart. Be safe.)

There are few photos that inspire the awe of a good lightning shot. Perhaps it’s the rarity or the sheer power, but there’s no doubt that a lightning shot will draw a lot of attention. The best part is that taking a good shot is actually pretty easy.

The basic things to understand:

• Know Your Weather – I’ve seen storms up and down the east coast and down into the Caribbean. I lived in Florida for a year where I experienced the daily 3pm thunderstorms and now I’m living in the mountains of Southwestern Virginia where we mostly see storms in the late summer. What I’ve found is that storms can be very different from region to region, but are fairly easy to predict at a local level (mountain storms roll through fast and violent while Caribbean thunderstorms seem to drift by slowly.) A good source of real-time radar is very handy to have. My preference is the NOAA site, but there are much more user-friendly sites out there so look around.
• Pick a Good Location – Being in the right position ties into the above point. If you know how the storms in your area will move, you should be able to pick a spot ahead of it and wait. Open sky and a wide angle lens will give you a better chance of catching a bolt. More distance from the storm and a zoom lens is a much safer route to go plus it will give you more time to shoot.
• Time of Day – A storm associated with a frontal area can show up anytime while summer convective storms will typically happen in the afternoon or evening. The darker it is, the easier it will be to capture a well exposed lightning image (more about this in the technical section below.)

Shooting Techniques:

• Correct Exposure – Correct exposure for the actual bolt will be easy to obtain. It’s so bright that it’s going to be a thin white line no matter what your settings. The tricky bit is knowing when you’ve collected enough light to correctly expose the clouds, horizon, foreground, etc. that comprise the rest of your scene. If shooting in the daytime, your camera should be able to give you the correct settings, however, the shutter speed will be so quick that your odds of capturing a bolt will be slim. You can try using an ND filter and/or increasing your F-Stop to reduce the incoming light. Shooting at or after dusk is going to be much easier because you have longer intervals to shoot before your overall image becomes overexposed and washed out.
• The Shot Window – A shot window is just a way of saying the amount of time you have to collect light after you’ve reached a minimum exposure, but before your image becomes overexposed. The window will be from the time it takes to get the minimum exposure to roughly 2 to 4 times that amount. The goal is to start your picture, see some bolts, and have the shutter close inside that shot window. The importance of hitting this window is that it’s ensuring that the overall image is exposed properly and not just areas in the reflecting the lightning flash.As an example, let’s say we’re shooting a scene that without lightning flashes would take a 5 second shutter speed to get a bright enough exposure. It would also take 20 seconds of light collection before we’d consider the image to be overexposed. Our shot window is from 5 to 20 seconds after we’ve opened the shutter. Any more or any less and we will not be happy with the end result.
• Use a Cable Release and Bulb Mode – In most cases a delay timer can be used in place of a remote release. In this case however, the remote shutter will make life much easier. You can still use the delay timer, but the delay could cause some frustrations with missed shots. Bulb mode (opening and closing the shutter manually instead of having the camera use a preset shutter speed) is also beneficial. That will allow you to count to your shot window and close it early or late depending on the amount of lightning flashes you’ve had.
• Pause Your Exposure – If you’d like to fill your shot with multiple bolts, but the storm is dishing them out too slow for your shot window, try pausing your count by blocking the light coming into your lens with a sheet of paper. This trick is more useful when there’s a lot of ambient light which reduces your shot window, but it is also helpful at night to keep out unwanted light (such as the headlights of a car driving past.)

The Walkthrough:
Now let’s put the knowledge and basics into an example of how I got a specific shot (we’ll use the one at the top of this post with the pier.) During June we were having very strong late evening thunderstorms rolling through like clockwork so I decided to catch one. I checked the NOAA radar and saw it approaching so I grabbed the camera with a 14-24mm wide-angle lens and tripod and headed out.

I already had a few spots picked out that would make for a nice composition, so I picked the one that was most favorable for the storm passing by and got into position. Once I had the tripod set and the remote trigger ready to go I took some baseline shots so I could get a feel for what the shot window would be. It was late evening so the shot window turned out to be between 20 and 80 seconds.

When the storm came into view I started shooting. Opening the shutter, counting to my shot window, and closing earlier if I had already seen some bolts, or later if I hadn’t. With the four bolt shot above, those strikes had come in quick succession almost immediately after I had opened the shutter. I continued counting until I hit about 20 seconds and closed the shutter. It wasn’t long after that when a bolt struck very near where I was standing at which point I knew it was time to go inside.