At the end of last May I got a lightning trigger. This is a device that works on the principal that between the time it takes the circuit to work plus the time it takes your camera to take a photo, there will be enough of a deficit that you can take a photo of lightning.
The logic behind this is, when you are using a fairly decent camera, you should have a fairly fast amount of shutter-lag. This is the time it takes for the shutter to open and start taking a photo, or recording the image in the case of digital photography. With my main digital SLR the shutter lag is about 35-45ms. The lightning trigger works in a matter of microseconds. A lightning even its self can be from 100ms to 400ms.
Usually when lightning strikes, there is a large chain of events that make it possible and there are more than one strike, but this all happen so rapidly that you can’t really detect that this happened.
This would mean that the lightning event is taking longer than it takes the completion of the circuit and camera to take the photo.
In other words, you can be taking a photo while the lightning is actually happening.
I had to basically only shoot lightning in the night before the concept of a trigger. This was because a big storm would come. I would leave the shutter open for long periods of time and when lightning would strike, it would record on the already being made image. The longer the shutter is open, the more data is captured and a lightning strike could happen in the time it was open.
It was tedious, but I got a lot of awesome photos.
Two cloud-to-ground lightning strikes at once on July 30, 2011.
The big problem that I had was storms in full day-light. Even with thick cloud-cover and having my aperture set to F22, I couldn’t usually get to close to 1/2 second shutter time. It was usually closer to being 1/5 – 1/10 second. I know this sounds slow but in reality, I could take 600 shots of a storm and only get one shot of lightning during the day. Even then, the shot may not be very good.
In the day time, you are doing the exact opposite of night. Instead of leaving the shutter open and lightning happens, you have to keep taking photos and just hope that lightning would strike in those fractions of a second that the shutter was open; not to mention the issue with an aperture of f22 being way too tight for faint limbs of a lightning strike or even distant shots. There just isn’t enough contrast between the ambient light and the strike.
I like to start off at about f3.5-f4 with distant lightning in the night, and if the storm comes really close, I will go to f8 and even f10 if its on top of me. I like to do this same thing in the night, with the only big difference is the shutter speed.
How do I cut down on the amount of shots I take in the day time with thunderstorms?
A device that can detect the strike!
I bought a lightning trigger.
This was one of the best buys that I have made with photography.
Not only does it detect lightning in the dark, but it does a great job of getting lightning in the day-time as well. I have cut down on the amount of bad shots with nothing in the frame where before, I would have to stop sometimes and actually delete hundreds of photos from my memory card to make room for more.
The above photo was one of my first really good night shots that the lightning trigger helped me get.
A couple of things that I would like to address before I’m done here tonight:
How do I get the cameras shutter lag down so far?
If you want to get the most out of your camera when shooting lightning and get the shutter lag cut down to the minimum, you will need to set the white-balance on the camera, put it in manual mode, set the aperture and have a set shutter speed and you will have to focus the lens to infinity.
When you do these things, the camera circuitry doesn’t have to process anything at-all. It just takes the exact photo that you have it set to take. Setting the white-balance on the incandescent bulb setting will make your lightning strike super white with blue skies. This is also a smart setting to use in the city where you have a lot of different light sources. It seems to be the less offensive with pesky street and house lights. Setting it to a fluorescent setting will make the light put off by the strike a bold purple. The shade and flash white-balance settings will usually give you kind of a Gray colored sky with orange or red flashes from the lightning. You can use these setting creatively to make some powerful and impressive photos of Mother Nature at her best.
Last, if you are considering taking photos of lightning, I would highly advise that you never do this the way that I do. When lightning is close, get out of it. Remember, you are usually in the open with a metal tripod that has electronic devices stacked on top of it waiting to get hit. Use caution because lightning can strike you.