Lately I tried to photograph lightnings. This is nothing I ever really tried before. It was a spontaneous decision to try it, since we had a stormy evening with many lightnings in the sky. So I quickly grabbed my tripod and my camera and did it the lazy way. I put my tripod on our balcony and tried to figure out how to best shoot the lightnings. From my balcony the foreground isn’t particularly spectacular. So I decided to take a long lens and to concentrate only on the sky without any disturbing buildings and light sources. I opted for the Sony 135mm 1.8 GM lens. A wonderfully sharp lens with a small aperture. It's one of my favourite lenses I own. The images from this lens are perfectly crisp, contrasty, sharp and beautifully rendered, doesn’t matter what you shoot with it.

Once my tripod and camera were in the right position, I tried to figure out, how to best shoot lightnings. I did a couple of test shots and ended up trying out apertures between 1.8 and 2.5, a shutter speed between 5 and 30 seconds and ISO of 100 to 400. Given that the sky wasn’t that dark, I ended up with good results using the 5 second shutter speed.

Quickly I learned that photographing a lightning requires the right timing to be able to catch one. First I took the images pressing the shutter-release button by hand. I soon switched to an interval shooting. I set up the interval on 5 seconds shutter speed and no delay for 200 pictures and let camera do its job.

With this settings I didn’t miss any lightnings anymore and just had to sort out all the images where no lightnings were happening during the 5 seconds of an image (which was for most of the images the case). But I was lucky and was able to catch a couple of lightnings.

Here a few images I was able to take at this stormy evening. It was interesting to try and I will certainly retry it again, but next time I’m gonna look for a nice foreground :-)

Lightning photography - First Time

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