LIGHTNING - Taking a shot

[AltairBK]

Hi,

Has anyone experience in taking a picture of lightning with a digital camera? Yesterday there was a "nice" storm and I got an idea of taking a picture of lightning. I have canon A60. How should I set my camera to make good pictures in the night?

Does someone has samples of pictures of lightning?

BR

[DanyaL]

Either try a long exposure(15 SECONDS) with aperture closed down. or Try your luck and use continuous shots(but I don't think you'll get any lightning with that).

[Conk]

Use the search at the top of the page. There's been lots of lightning topics and photos.

[stduc]

First find you storm!

I have had some luck using the following method using an A20.

Turn off the display and turn off review and turn off the focus assist beam (A70)
Put the camera in multishot mode
Put the exposure on manual.
Set the exposure correction to -2
Set the focus to infinity.
Use a tripod or bean bag with some other support (such as the top of a low wall)

On an A70 I guess Aperture priority mode might be best and also set manual focus to infinity and then experiment with various aperture settings and maybe also set exposure correction to some other value than 0.

The idea is to get the camera to keep the shutter open as long as possible but shut it as soon as the lightning flashes and start taking the next picture. So fully manual mode is not a good idea and neither is fully automatic as the camera will waste time focussing.

You then have to guess when and where the next flash will be and press the shutter, don't move and don't let go until you can see the camera buffer is full and it needs time to write to the CF card

and
finally

get lucky!

Best of luck.