Lights, sound, camera..... Action!

[miker]

As a fairly big thunderstorm passed by Montreal on Saturday, so I figured it was a good first time to try to catch some lightning. Tried a bunch of different settings and did manage catch a few (mostly with 5 second exposures), but any advice on preferred settings for this type of photography would be much appreciated.

[Iguanasan]

These two turned out OK but have a strange colour to them. Time of day, maybe? I have never tried it but MA should be able to offer some advice since he has a few really nice lightning shots.

Without Googling any details I would suggest a tripod, a remote shutter release, a large F-stop both to block as much light as possible and to increase DOF to the max, and a low ISO 100 or lower if you can get it.

Put the camera on bulb or a very long exposure and let the lightening be your flash.

I've been anxious to try but we don't get that many lightening storms in Halifax.

[miker]

Thanks for the advice Iguanasan. Definitely needs some practice and finetuning for next time around, but I will try it out for sure. The coloring was actually pretty special that day because of different layers of clouds, the time of day and sometimes very localized rain showers which seemed to filter the light as well.

[Mad Aussie]

Iggy pretty much sums it up. Timer can work well if the time exposure is under 30 secs though also. If it's daylight then putting on your CP or ND filters will help darken the sky a bit.
Lightning is usually a fair way away when you shoot it (hopefully) so manually focus on something obvious, or if you can't see anything in the dark and gloom then set the focus to just back from infinite usually works well.

[Hillbillygirl]

Actually that first capture is not bad at all Miker, well done.