How to take pictures of lightning

A few people have asked me how I took the pictures of lightning, so I figured I'd share how I did it. Hopefully I don't get too technical.

Equipment I used:

• Tripod
• Cable shutter release
• A camera that allows you to manually adjust the shutter speed and the aperture
• Luck

Lightning is best captured at night because you can leave your shutter open for long periods of time and wait for a good strike. When a strike happens, and it's bright enough, it burns the image onto the sensor. The simple answer is I set my camera to "bulb" allowing me to keep the shutter open for as long as I chose, plugged in my cable release, pointed at an area where I had seen lightning and opened the shutter. When I saw a good, bright strike, I closed the shutter. I usually did this repeatedly, leaving the shutter open for 30 seconds or so each time.

You need a lot of patience. Fortunately the storm was pretty active. But every now and then I closed the shutter and prepared to open it again a really neat strike would hit and I missed it.

For those who know a little about photography, my camera settings were as follows:

• Shutter speed - Bulb, left open for 20 to 30 seconds.
• Aperture - I did it set at F16 for the pics below.
• I also had the camera focused manually.

You don't have to have a super duper nice big camera to do this. As long as you can shut off the flash, stick your camera on a tripod, and change the shutter speed you can capture lighting. If your camera doesn't have a bulb setting - no problem. Just set your shutter to open for as long as you can and turn on the self timer. Then you won't have to touch the camera to take the picture.

I hope that helps. If anyone is into photography, one of the best sites out there I've found is Digital Photography School. The blog there is great and there are forums where people post how they took their pictures. It's a great resource.