Not bad for a 1st attempt.
I was looking at these and thinking to myself there are two that stood out as being better than the rest and then I looked at the exif data and realized why ..
they were the ones with the longest shutter time ... which at 3.2 seconds I think is kinda short for lightning shots. Those should have been exposed at least a couple seconds more, IMHO.
You absolutely do not want aperture priority for a setting when taking lightning. You need shutter control. Actually you really don't want auto settings if you can help it. Use Manual. The lightning will create a bright spots which will cause the underexposing of the rest of the image when auto settings are used..
Exposing the Image for at least a second or two after the strike is Fine, you might even catch an extra strike on the same image.
How were you shooting; did you set up a tripod and Fire the shutter the second you seen a flash?
I have not shot Lightning in Digital yet, but when I did shoot them with film, I would expose during a storm for 20 to 30 seconds, hoping to catch a strike & more often than catching a single strike I would get no strikes or multiple.
I don't have any scanned that I can show, but it was a method taught to me long ago by professionals, Tho they did recommend longer times to catch Multiple strikes.
I remember seeing one of my professors examples that was shot with a 4x5 camera at f/64, ASA 100, for several minutes (10 I think but I can't remember for sure) and the whole skyline was lit up with many strikes. I remember it was the skyline of some town in Arizona and I could count atleast 10 strikes in the image.
I think this type of photography is where Film is still king ,
But anyway, you got me wanting to try my hand at this now too :smile:
Too bad I missed the thunder storm we had two days ago here in NY.
