Watching My First Storm Roll In This Year

I love watching storms roll in. Where I live though I have houses and trees that really prevent me from really watching them come in. I usually end up in an upper level window trying to see as much as I can. For the start of this storm my oldest was with me just watching everything. She kept asking why my camera was not out. Of course once the first big lightning strike happened I had the tripod and camera heading back upstairs. It is always fun making lightning photos because it is all up to chance. You are really not in control of anything but your camera settings.

Making Lightning Photos

After posting this I had a few questions on how I capture lightning photos. It really is not that hard to just capture bolts in the sky as far as camera settings go. You treat your scene like you would one that you would light with strobes. You underexpose so that the lightning lights it up. I usually set my ISO to 100 or 50 and the f-stop around somewhere around f/8. What I want to do is to have an exposure time of 30 seconds so my settings need to get me there. Here I was at ISO 100 and f/9 to get me to a 30 second exposure. From there you are just hitting the button and praying for luck to strike. With an object in the foreground you have a tougher job balancing the light. I will get into that more at a later date. While making my photos on Tuesday night I came up with a couple of ideas of photos to make during the next storm.