AlpenglowJoin me learning Nature Photography

Lightning photography seems either extremely easy, or extremely hard: When the thunder god is willing to show his best side, all you need is a camera and a tripod and some patience. If not, it seems impossible to get a single image with a lightning visible in any corner of the frame.

Until last month I was strictly subscribed to the latter – I had tried but never made any lightning photo the subject was clearly visible in. This changed when Thor (or pick your favorite one from the Wikipedia List Of Thundergods) showed his muscles as I hadn’t seen before…

The theory to take an image like above is rather easy:

1. Put the camera on a steady tripod.
2. Put it into Manual exposure mode (that’s the M, you heard correctly )!
3. Decide on an exposure time that will be long enough to get some lightning in there – you will press the shutter *before* you see a lightning… I chose 10 seconds here. 30 might do as well, depending on the amount of ambient light. You want your photo to be all black when taken without lightnings’ light.
4. Lightning is very very bright, but it will vary greatly depending on rain and distance. Ideally, you have none or at least not heavy rain. In addition,  you can decide to get only the brightest lightnings correctly exposed, and have the weak ones underexposed. I started with setting the ISO to 100 (or “low” on a Nikon), and closed the aperture down to 8, and later adjusted it to 11 when I saw I was still getting some overexposed images.
5. Take a test image to check the exposure without lightning.
6. Make sure the focus is on the foreground you framed. Focus manually and turn off autofocus. It won’t work in the pitch black night anyway, and slow down every shutter release.
7. And now comes the hard part – if you are lucky, your camera supports an automatic interval timer like my D300 does. Else, you will need a cable release with that feature, or do manual clicks all night long.  Use the interval timer to repeat taking exposures until your flash card is full or the thunder is gone.
   I set my Nikon to do 500 images with a gap of 1 second (the smallest possible). Thus, I would expose 10 seconds, then the camera would wait for a second, and then shoot the next 10 second image. So I could make sure I would have 91% of all lightning on my sensor within the framed part of the sky.
8. For this image, I did not take a wide angle but rather a mild telelens (100 mm on a 1.5x crop camera here). I chose a pleasing (well, you might recognize the building from my earlier teleconverter tests) foreground and framed a part of the night sky where I hoped the lightning would occur, and waited…

The fun part is harvesting the results after the thunderstorm. This one lasted a full three hours, and I kept adjusting the part of the sky I was photographing to the slowly moving “hot spot” of lightning as the clouds were moving as well. The exposure time of 10 seconds allowed to aggregate multiple smaller lightnings into one frame like in the image above.

“Depending on the storm, lightning flashes can last for several hundred milliseconds and contain dozens of strokes each occurring approximately 40 milliseconds apart.” (lightningtrigger.com)

Statistics? Well, I took 303 images, of which 247 showed no sign of lightning at all. 23 were lit by lightning not in the frame or just barely being visible (for those tiny lightnings, the aperture was closed too much). Another 18 showed more promising lightning strikes which were either under- or overexposed, or were just at the border of the frame. This left me with 15 rather decent lightning images.

Of those, I really liked the spectactular above and this one:

So the next time you meet the Thunder God, enjoy the digital age, make sure to have a tripod with you and just shoot away! But stay safe and out of the danger area – read through the safety tips by the NWS before you decide to give it a try! I made these photos through a window from the safety from my home!

If you wonder how our grandfathers did this without the blessing of digital images, have a look at this great page at weatherscapes, with more info on the different type of thunderstorms and more. And if you are looking into daytime lightning photography, you will have to invest in more gear (oh joy!) and have a look at a lightning trigger (more great information about lightning photography there as well!).

With last weekend’s stunning winter sun and a cobalt blue sky over deep frozen snow, of course I couldn’t leave the camera alone. And actually a lesson I learned two winters ago came to my rescue – how to produce the nice sunstar effect, which is about turning the sun in the picture into a bright star-like shape with rays protuding from it. A very special look, but usually nicer than just a blown-out blotch of whiteness you get if you miss out on this one.

I was hiking in the Chiemgau mountain range, and came across this old tree wanting to be a nice foreground. I found that at that time of day the sun was making its way into the picture, and as always if it’s that close to the border of the frame – I chose to include it.

Did so, and snapped a picture to see whether this motif would work (ok, not that great, but good enough to show the effect).

I thought it came out ok – but – who was talking about ugly white blotches in the sky where the sun was supposed to be? So, in order to create a nice sun star, do:

1. Close your aperture. This is important. I usually choose f/16 or f/22.
2. Clean your front lens. If it has any dirt speckles, the image will be useless.
3. Hope that your sensor is clean – that much stopped down, it will show. Better sort that out before going into the field.
4. Remove any filter from your lens, as in all these backlighting situations image quality can suffer because of light trapped between filter and front lens, reducing overall contrast.
5. Choose the right lens. This is something that seems to be amiss in most tutorials I found (nice ones here and here), but in my experience the lens really makes the difference!

My standard lens I also used for the picture above is the rather old kit lens AF-S 18-70 mm DX, which is really nice, but it does perform miserably in terms of sun stars. My Tokina 12-24 mm wide angle, which I mostly use for landscape situations like this, luckily performs much better – I just love its 18 ray sun stars! Quick switch of lens, retake photo utilizing also the larger view angle possible – quite a difference, eh?

By the way, the shape of the sun star depends on the number of blades the physical aperture in the lens has: An even number will create one ray per blade, an odd number of blades will create a sunstar with twice as many rays as blades. I also read that curved blades used for making the nicest Bokeh are rather bad for sunstars, which come out better with straight blades. Seems the Tokina got 9 straight ones!

And here is the image from two winters ago, which shows that the Tokina can produce sunstars also with the full sun in the image, not just when it’s partially obscured by trunks or trees. And it shows how I learned I should rather clean the front lens

Hope that was useful to you! But tell us about your experience – do you have lenses that excel (or perform badly) when doing sunstars?