Last night, I tried lightning photography for the first time with some amazing results. Since I was not sure about the proper exposure for lightning photography, I was playing around a little before I got the camera set properly to ISO 100 at f/8.0 with a 15 second exposure. All the pictures looked really good until a lightning struck just across the street from where I was located (see the image above). That strike completely blew the exposure by about 3-4 stops due to its intensity. Gladly I shot in Raw and was able to salvage the file. For the future, I will try to adjust the exposure as the thunderstorm moves closer. Something between f/16 and f/22 would have been perfect for last night, so I hope to be lucky enough to catch another one of those. To see more of my photos, you can visit my Portfolio or my Flickr page.
This shot was done with a Nikkor 18-55mm lens, as I really do not want to take more expensive equipment into the rain. I bought this lens from Adorama when it was still $180. Now it sells as a special for $99.95 on Adorama. If you use this link to buy your equipment, it does not cost you anything, but it will help me keep writing articles like this one.
Here is one more picture from last night that I just finished:
Edit: The day after I went to the place where the lightning struck. The explosion you see in the first picture is due to the lightning hitting a power line and completely destroying it and burning some branches of the surrounding trees. Sadly I came a little bit too late to photograph the damage, so all I saw were a new pole and some cut trees.
