Tonight was the night I caught more awesome shots of lightning bolts than I have in the over four years I’ve been shooting storms from my front porch. Not only was there frequent lightning bolts but the storm ended up regenerating giving another hour of shooting which exhausted the batteries in the D700!
The actual technique is simplicity itself…set the camera on the tripod and set it for manual focus to infinity. Dial in an aperture ranging from f/5.6 to f/11 and attach a remote trigger (preferably with an intervalometer) which is the only way to get the Nikons that support manual shutter operation to allow you to enter bulb mode.
The key is to open the shutter and hold it open until you see a lightning bolt. By the time your optic nerve and brain realizes it’s just seen a lightning bolt and you release the trigger, the bolt has probably been up and down and all round about fourteen times or so and paints itself on the open sensor.
An intervalometer is nice because it automates the opening and shutting of the shutter…I set mine for 10 seconds with a short delay between exposures and it happily clicks off the number of exposures I’ve told it to shoot. (It’s also good for freaking out the neighbors who had never seen the camera being driven remotely!)
The tricky bit is having a storm cooperate by throwing out tons of lightning bolts and having the camera aimed in the right direction. I clicked off about 1,260 exposures and a little over 10% of them were keepers which is way better than the usual average.
Of course, lightning is good for exposing the fact that I really need to clean that 50mm f/1.4 lens with the spots on the left side of the frame. But the other nice thing about that 50mm f/1.4 lens is the beautiful 14-point stars on the streetlights created by the seven-bladed diaphragm at the back of the lens.
Supposedly we’re in for another round of storms tomorrow…I’ll be out on the porch but it’ll be hard to top this storm for lightning bolt quality! 🙂
