How To Photograph Lightning

It isn’t all that difficult. Sure, it needs some planning to photograph lightning beforehand, but once learned, anyone can do it.

The professionals do it the way I’m about to tell you. I know, because I was one of them. A professional that is. Let me give you the simple lowdown on this exciting subject matter for your l camera.

Novices think you hold your camera up to your eye when you see the lightning bolt, you crack off a snap. They treat it like any other photo. They point and shoot. Done.

It is possible to get a picture of lightning this way, but it relies more on luck than skill. In many cases, the lightning strike intended for the picture wasn’t the one captured. Highly active storm cells generate many flashes in bursts, so a rogue bolt that appears late actually saves the day!

There is one fundamental problem that fails us: Our reaction time (the eye-brain-finger-press-shutter movement is slow).

By the time the shutter gets a signal from our head through our finger, the moment has passed. Remember, this is speed-of-light stuff. Unless your finger has pressed down before the flash of lightning appears, anything you capture comes well after the event.

If photographing lightning isn’t done this way, then how is it done?

As mentioned, a camera’s button needs to be pressed before the strike occurs to capture it. It can be pressed a millisecond before it, or, as the pros do, minutes beforehand.

Minutes? Wait. What?

That sounds crazy, doesn’t it? How can a photographer know minutes beforehand that a lightning strike is going to take place? Is the Pro psychic?

No. It’s actually not as unpredictable as you think. The storm is already in place. That’s why you’re there with your camera. And if the storm cell is active in the southern skies, you know that there’s no point facing the camera to the north. Most of the mystery isn’t mysterious at all. The only ‘unknown’ left to consider is when. The EXACT moment a lightning strike occurs isn’t absolutely certain, but it’s close. It’s guaranteed to happen within a few seconds to a few minutes. This is when the real work in lightning photography is done.

Expanding on this, the idea is to start the photographing sequence before the lightning bolt arrives, and let the bolt reach the scene while the shutter is still open.

A shutter can be open for several seconds or minutes at a time. If the shutter is open for many minutes before a strike appears in the sky, it’ll record it when it does. That’s when you stop the photo (close the camera’s shutter) and see what you captured in the frame. Bingo!

Manually operated cameras have shutter settings that can be controlled manually. They have many other settings too, but the biggie here is the shutter control. We need long shutter times to create lightning magic. If your camera doesn’t have this facility, get one that does!

When you have practised this process many times, you’ll get good at it. Sometimes many strikes will occur, and they’ll be captured in the long exposure shot, too!

Now that I’ve given you the basics in simple speak, let me get more technical about what I’ve just said. Clearly, there’s more detail to it.

Modern SLR cameras have shutter settings that range from 1/5000th of a second (for high-speed action photography) to a full second (for night photography). When the exposure time exceeds 1 second, we generally call it long exposure photography. Cameras offer long exposure timings like 2secs; 4secs; 10secs; 30secs; 1min; 2min; etc. This is long-exposure world. It’s where lightning photography resides.

One setting at the very end of the long list is a strange one called “Bulb” or “Bu”. Sometimes it’s simply known as “B”. It’s not a number but letters. This is the magical granddaddy of long-exposure photography. This is where the shutter stays open for as long as you hold down the button, like for 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15.5 minutes, 4 hours (think star photography), etc.

Nice eh?

But there’s a problem using it. Not all photographers want to keep a finger pressed down on a button for that long. It’s tiring. Boring. They will use a remote lead to do it instead, with a shutter locking facility. This is the secret to photographing lightning well.

By now, you may be wondering: “That’s also an awfully long time to be pointing a camera at one place. How do you keep the camera from moving while taking the picture?”

The word that follows this question is TRIPOD. You can’t avoid NOT having one.

ALL long-exposure photography projects require them. Your camera must be dead-still for the duration of the exposure for this to work. If it’s not, motion blur will occur in photos, making the pictures look fuzzy.

A basic run-down list of what to have/do when photographing lightning.

1. (DSLR) or SLR Camera – Manual shutter, aperture and focus controls.
2. Tripod – Sturdy, low windage.
3. Remote Lead – Wireless or wired is okay.
4. Low Light Situation – Night or near night.
5. City Lights – Minimal
6. Timer – Watch or stopwatch.

(D) SLR Camera is self-explanatory. If you can’t set your camera to the aforementioned timings, then there’s no point in reading this article any further. (Point-and-shoot cameras / phones / iPads / etc, don’t have the options to control the elements needed for lightning photography.)

When it comes to aperture, try setting f8.0 (100 ISO) first. (Higher aperture numbers will show more detail in a lightning bolt. Lower numbers will brighten and ‘thicken’ it.)

When it comes to shutter speeds, start with thirty seconds and then increase the time. If the picture becomes pale, you’ve gone too long for the amount of light that’s in the sky (See ‘Low Light’ details), and you need to reduce the time again.

Auto-Focus is best switched off when photographing lightning. It’ll only cause you trouble while trying to focus on the dark (and it won’t start taking pictures until it finds something). By switching it off and leaving the lens set to infinity (for distant objects), you’re free to click whenever you’re ready. The lightning will come when it’s good and ready, somewhere in the middle of the photographing cycle. Somewhere between the open shutter and when it closes.

Tripods and Remotes work together when photographing lightning. Wireless remotes are better because they eliminate windage issues; there’s no chance of a lead blowing in the wind and causing small vibrations in the picture. Storm fronts ahead of lightning often generate strong wind gusts that can shake the tripod and anything attached to it. (This is also why I removed the strap from my camera and always make sure each foot of my tripod is on solid ground, not on spongy grass!)

Low-light times are when the Pros are photographing the most lightning. Daytime doesn’t cut it. It’s not just because a lightning bolt doesn’t stand out so much; it’s also because long exposures raise a major concern: overexposure. One way to reduce this problem is to wait for darkness to fall. When the sun goes away, the light goes with it. That’s when the long-exposure photographers come out to play!

Ambient City Light can be as bad as daylight. A steady but long glow from a city’s lights will overexpose a long nighttime photograph in no time. My tip is to take some test shots before the storm arrives to determine the maximum shutter speed, then keep it under that when the storm hits. You can always brighten a dark digital photo later. Overexposed shots will be destined for the waste bin or deletion.

A Timer helps you keep track of the exposure time for each photo when photographing lightning. I don’t use a stopwatch or my phone. The phone is too bright at night, and a stopwatch clicks too much. I wear a mechanical watch with a second hand that ticks loudly enough for me to count off the seconds in the dark. (I don’t need a light with me to unnecessarily ruin my night vision.)

-Michael Forman (Author of Dark Fiction, SEETHINGS with a lightning photographer as its protagonist, see below)

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‘Forman’s writing style is artful, with the protagonist Mitchell’s warped thought processes masterfully exposed. The author has a powerful and vivid command of language and his word pictures are stark and disturbingly real.’

Linda J Bettenay, author of ‘Secrets Mothers Keep’ and ‘Wishes For Starlight’