lightning photos, digital

[hipshot]

does anyone successfully photograph lightning with their digital slr?

seems all the "how to" I've found is for film cameras and involve keeping the shutter open and setting the camera to B.

[ssim]

I've tried shooting lightning before with mediocre results. The concept is the same whether it be digital or film.

I did a search on the forum for lightning and it returned an extensive list. There have been some awesome shots of lightning on here this year.

[hipshot]

ahhh, i was searching just in EOS section which didn't produce zip
thanks

[mattchase]

I have successfully captured some decent bolts with my 10D, but was unhappy with the capabilities of the file. By that I mean that, given that lightning is so unpredicatble, the file size limitations are pretty great and for some reason interpolating the images made them look "digital crunchy" (not sure how else to explain it). The bolts I captured were very large, but were a number of miles away (I would guess maybe 5-8 miles), and so are only a small portion of the overall frame. This is a very common thing when shooting lightning, so I often expect to have to crop into the frame a bit to get the best composition / print out of the shots. I usually don't have a problem interpolating from my 10D, but in this case it just didn't keep a very good quality. Maybe lightning affects the sensor different than normal light does, I don't know. All I know is it didn't give me the results I normally get when I shoot film.

A coworker shot a storm with me once where he captured a few good bolts. He was using a Kodak DCS Pro Back on a Mamiya 645 AFD, about a $20,000 setup, yet his results were similar to mine. At smaller sizes, the images look fine, but when he printed his at 11x14 it had that same "digital crunchy" look to it as my shots did. This is why I still shoot medium format film on lightning, the larger film size gives a decent amount of room for cropping / enlarging, and as long as the bolt takes up a fair amount of room, I haven't had any problems with enlargements. That one storm I shot with my 10D will be the last storm I shoot with a digital camera for some time.