First time capturing Lightning

Kansas City skyline...

Straight from the camera with a crop and minor exposure adjustment. Colors were not altered (the purple sky is genuine):

what were your camera settings?

Camera:
Canon T1i | 24-70mm f/2.8 L @ 59mm (before crop)

Settings:
f/20 | 6.0s | ISO: 400

Regarding JacobCambell's post, I can't really tell what you are asking. It was not raining where I was shooting. I don't know if it was over downtown, but it looks like it was. Last night was a perfect night for lightning shots....clear sky except some eerie clouds that rolled in with a lot of electrical activity. I have a few more shots I'm going to upload to flickr and I'll post.

beecee

Sorry...forgot to mention. I was on a Manfrotto pod with my shutter on "BULB". I used a wireless shutter remote. I was pretty much leaving the shutter open for 10-30s trying to capture some strikes and this one just happened to strike right when I opened the shutter. Hence, it was a bit underexposed until I bumped it up a little PP. Interestingly (and you'll see this when I post the others), because the shutter wasn't open very long, I got that purple look to the sky. This didn't occur with strikes caught on >15s shutters.

Ok, here are some others. Two of these required Noise Ninja to smooth them out and both were overesposed so I brought them down a bit in photoshop. All three were cropped (how can you frame a picture correctly when you have no idea where the bolts will strike hahaha), but there were no other PP alterations.

The second shot in your second post is great.

Bit more light in the sky up in the clouds and a little foreground to put it all in perspective. Well done!

I don't really get the chance to do lightning shots down here, we don't get many storms, let alone electrical storms.

Very nice!
Looks almost as though the lightening is trying to wrap around the antenna tower in that last one..

Weather / Lightening is one of my favorite subjects for photography, but it can get scary sometimes.
My Weather photography

Ooh, ace shots, I love lightning photos. You'll find that the purple colour is quite a common thing with lightning too.

Thanks for the kind words. I'm pretty excited how they came out. I've been watching weather patterns for the last few weeks and just a few days ago has been the best opportunity yet. I really dig the purple.

Those are awesome! I especially like the second-to-last one but they're all great
One comment: did you have a reason to shoot at f/20 and iso 400? Unless you wanted that star flare from the street lights, I would have dropped the iso and opened up the aperture.

very good job

these shots are amazing.

mpistone wrote in post #10122719
Those are awesome! I especially like the second-to-last one but they're all great
One comment: did you have a reason to shoot at f/20 and iso 400? Unless you wanted that star flare from the street lights, I would have dropped the iso and opened up the aperture.

No, no particular reason. I'll admit I'm still pretty new to photography and as the thread states this was the first time I've shot lightning.

My thoughts were:

Small aperature (in the f/16-f/22 range) would keep the whole shot in focus due to a very large DOF. I was worried if I went down to the f/11 or lower range I'd capture the lightning, but the other parts of the shot would be out of focus.

I probably should have tried some other shots around ISO 100 and just left the shutter open for a lot longer. The reason I went with 400 to 800 was the strikes were very close together, so I wanted the sensor sensitive enough to expose the strike, and then I could close the shutter (on bulb) and start a new picture and wait approx 15-25s for the next strike.

I'm interested in other people's experiences with lightning and what settings have been successful. We're coming into peak storm season here in Kansas, so I am sure to try again and will likely try different settings.

Thanks for all the compliments! I'll keep working to improve.

BC

The small aperture isn't necessary. Check out this page. Even at fairly wide apertures, if you focus on anything farther than a few hundred feet you'll have depth of field out to infinity (this is the hyperfocal distance). Otherwise, picking and iso/aperture combination to get the shutter speed to whatever length you want is a good idea.