Lightning strike

I've always wanted to have a go at lightning shots, but felt they were somehow mysterious, needing superhuman timing, maybe a funky gadget or two and oodles of luck. Well, some of those are certainly useful, but putting aside those issues, a storm over the house had me out on our deck. Armed with a vague inkling of how to go about the task, a little perseverance, and a lot of luck, WHAM!! Lightning does strike where you point the camera...

Lightning strike over Mies

This was shot in August 2018, using the Canon 5D MkIV with the 24-70mm f/4: 24 mm, 8 seconds at f/4 and ISO100. Manual exposure, manual focus (just back from infinity), VR off. Once the framing was as I wanted, the interval timer was set to take 99 shots with an interval of 2 seconds. In all I took, or more accurately the camera took, somewhere in the region of 4-500 shots. From those, maybe 3 or 4 had a lightning strike of some sort, but this was by far the winner. Processed first through DPP, with minimal adjustments save to reduce the exposure by 1/2 ev, oh and to set the white balance to "White fluorescent" (bringing out the purple/blue tones), and ending with a light touch in PS.

Some reflections - don't be inhibited, and just give something a go - there's learning in every failure, and part of developing skills is being prepared to fail. Looking again at the exposure, I think I'd have been better at ISO200 and 4 seconds: a little less noise to deal with. And then, since I darkened the image by about 1/2 ev in DPP (the illuminated sky was just too bright), shooting at either f/5 or f/5.6.