Capturing The Power of Nature: Lightning

A summer thunderstorm brings the distinctive smell of rain on hot pavement, the whipping cooler wind, rolling thunder, and ultimately a beautiful lightning show.  Until recently I had never attempted to photograph lightning.  Like many folks, I have seen photographs showing the awesome power of lightning, and after years of seeing these photos I decided to finally try my hand at photographing lightning.

Having no experience photographing lightning, I decided it I would give it a try and before I did any research on techniques for lighting photography I wanted to try and figure it out myself.  Here is how I set up for the shots and little of my reasoning behind the settings:

1. First and foremost, I decided to utilize a tripod.  I figured I'd be shooting a lot, and having the camera stationary would allow me to compose the shots and easily adjust camera settings without changing the composition.
   
2. For my camera and lens choices, I decided to utilize my 17-22mm f2.8 lens on my Canon 7D body.  Thinking I wanted to have a wide angle lens with the option of a wide aperture available since I was shooting at night this would be my best option.  I also knew how this combination performed in lower light as it is my usual setup for night photography.
   
3. I opted to utilize a remote trigger for a couple of reasons:  Firstly, it would reduce camera shake during long exposures; and secondly, it would allow me to focus on watching the sky.
   
4. As for camera settings, I decided that I would utilize the lightning as an "off-camera" flash with that in mind, I initially set the camera as following:
   - Shutter Speed:  Bulb
   - f-Stop: f12
   - ISO: 100
   - White Balance:  3800K
   With the long exposures, the higher f-Stop and low ISO helped to cut the ambient light.  These settings were later adjusted as needed based on the ambient light levels, the light from lightning not in the frame, and the exposure time based on lightning which fell in the composed frame.
   

With these settings, I stood on my covered back porch and went to work...
Here are a few of my first photos:

Not to shabby for a first go at creating lightning photographs (in my opinion).  I did learn a lot from the experience, and the biggest lesson was patience.  Waiting for the lightning to cooperate can be a bit boring, but I think it can also be immensely rewarding.  The other big lesson was in balancing the camera settings with what the lightning is doing.  Watching the storm and how the lightning is behaving is a big task.  Learning when to open/close the shutter seemed to be a thing which I had to feel out, and ultimately balancing the camera settings against how long I expected the shutter to be open.

Buoyed by my first success, I jumped on the potential opportunity to photograph lightning during the next two thunderstorms.  Unfortunately, the second storm produced a lot of lightning in and behind the clouds which didn't afford any opportunities to catch the crazy sky-to-ground lightning.  So, instead I ended up with a couple of cool night landscape/cloud type shots.

The third opportunity came last night.  The storm was essentially three cells which merged over the Virginia Beach area created some amazing wind gusts, heavy downpours, and lots of lightning.  Again, standing on my covered back porch I utilized the same initial setup as before, and it seemed to work well; however, the lightning was not as "cooperative" as I had hoped it would be.  The sky was often well lit by lightning out of the frame and in the clouds, but I still managed to get a few cool shots.

Post processing

In post processing these lightning photos I took a somewhat different approach than I normally would.  Here is quick rundown of the edits; all edits were done in Adobe Lightroom:

1. Camera/Lens adaptation
2. White balance
3. Increased black and contrast to 100%
4. Decreased shadows
5. Decreased white, and increased the highlights (image dependent)
6. Sharpened and reduced noise (image dependent)
7. Recomposed and cropped as necessary
   

Here are a couple of the before/after images to compare: