I think that the best way is to have a camera that lets you leave the shutter open a long time, and use a low ISO. There's very little ambient light, relative to that of lightning bolts.

I suppose that another way would be digital camera that can detect when there was a flash and save the exposure for the period in which it occurred.

More ambient light than you may realize

By rsybuchanan on Tue, 07/14/2009 - 9:54am.

There's definitely an art to it that I haven't got down. I was trying to shoot the storm, too, at similar shutter speed and f/stop to this photo (I was stopped one ISO speed faster), but all I got was about 500 frames of rubbish. Bright, over-lit, sodium-bulb-orange rubbish. :(

Yeah, might take a lot of experimenting

By neilv on Tue, 07/14/2009 - 12:48pm.

Options: low ISO, stopped down to small aperture (will put more things in focus anyway), and maybe even ND filters.

Or ...

By adamg on Tue, 07/14/2009 - 1:22pm.

Wait for one of those afternoon storms :-).

Luckily Matt is nice enough

By Nice Shot Matt! on Tue, 07/14/2009 - 9:46am.

Luckily Matt is nice enough to allow us to see his SLR settings:

Camera: Nikon D40X
Exposure: 3.5 (sec)
Aperture: f/14.0
Focal Length: 20 mm
Focal Length: 20.0 mm
ISO Speed: 200
Exposure Bias: +5 EV
Flash: No Flash

And there you go.

but wait, there's more . . .

By iMatthew_ on Wed, 07/15/2009 - 12:33am.

thanks for all these comments everyone! I really appreciate it.

In addition to the EXIF data (posted above by "nice shot Matt" : )), here's a bit more on how I shot this. I quickly set up the tripod, stopped to f/14, set manual focus (on the Pru lights), and then continuously fired off 3-5 second exposures via remote trigger, hoping to capture something. I got lucky! Oh, and simply leaving the shutter open until there is a lightning flash that may be in frame quickly leads to an over (or over-over) exposed shot given how bright the flash is once it strikes (although this is less true if the strikes are much further away and/or less intense). Low ISO is a must (i forgot to check to knock this down to 100).

p.s. Keep trying rsybuchanan! & good luck RhoninFire and neilv if you give it a go

Evil Laugh

By SwirlyGrrl on Tue, 07/14/2009 - 3:03pm.

BWWAHHAHAHHHAHHHHHAHHHHAAAAAA! Heed my plans for world domination!

What was Ben Franklin thinking?

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