How to Take Pictures of Lightning with a D-SLR
My name is Connor Clemen, and right now I’m gonna be doing something little different in my reviews. I’m actually gonna be showing how to shoot lightning storms. I live in Tucson, Arizona, and lightning storms get pretty intense around here. So I’m going out in the desert, a little further away from my house, not too far away, to take some pictures of a distant lighting storm. And I’m also going to be showing techniques on how to be taking pictures of the lightning storm along with the camera equipment. So let’s go. Now the first thing we’re gonna be talking about with taking picture of storms is about the equipment you wanna use. First piece of equipment I got here is my tripod. Tripod is very important for taking pictures of storms of course, because you need a long exposure to capture that lightning flashes. You can't capture lightning in a single shot. You have to take one long exposure of about a hundred seconds or so, depending on how dark it is and how often the lightning strikes. So a tripod is a definite, definitely something you need if you’re taking a pictures of lightning storms. When it comes to taking pictures of lightning storms, most any camera will work, any camera that can expose for a long time over 30 seconds or so. Most compact cameras don’t have the feature bulb like DSLRs do, and what bulb does is it allows the photographer to take a picture as long as they want, whether it’s 30 seconds, a hundred seconds or 500 seconds. Most compact cameras can't do this, so, it’s a better idea to use a digital SLR with weather scene. Right here I have the D300 and it’s resistant to rain and dust and things like that, so if you get rain on the camera, you don’t have to worry about it seeping through to the electronics. When it starts to sprinkle and rain like this, it’s always best to get a plastic bag to put over your camera so it doesn’t get too wet. Once you have a bag on the camera, you’re pretty much good in terms of keeping rain out of the camera. But as you can see with the bag in front, you can't really take a picture. So what you’re gonna have to do is lift the bag over like this so it’s just covering the top of the lens and then now you can take the picture, but the rest of your camera is covered. And finally the last type of equipment that you’re gonna need to be able to take a storm picture of course is a lens. And for storms, I prefer to use medium telephoto or stronger telephoto lenses. In fact the best lenses are super zoomed lenses. Now for Nikon, the best lens to get for lightning photography I believe is the 18 to 200 millimeter VR lens. It allows you to have a very broad range. You can take pictures all the way from 200 millimeter all the way back to 18 millimeter, so you don’t have to take bags of lenses out of your camera and uncover your camera and get it wet. You can keep all your stuff dry while also having a super zoom range. Now I’m gonna talk about the settings that I set my camera to when I’m taking pictures of lightning. First thing I’m gonna talk about is shutter speed, and the settings I used for that. First, I’m gonna hit the mode button here on the D300, I’m gonna set it to manual right here. As you can see here I got it set to bulb, which allows you to press down the shutter, open up the shutter as you can hear right there and you can, as long as you're holding it down, the shutter will stay open. Then when you take your finger off the button, it closes. This is a very useful feature when you’re taking pictures of lightning. The reason I like to use bulb is because when you taking pictures of lightning most of the time you have to expose for many, many seconds. And we’re talking well over 30 seconds, sometimes to a hundred and fifty to 200 seconds long to get that lightning strike in. The next thing I’m gonna talk about is what I set my F stop to. And right now it’s set to F stop 8, but that’s a little bit too small for my taste when I’m taking pictures of lightning. I usually set it to 5.6 or lower like F stop 4 or so. The reason I take my pictures of lightning at F stop 5.6 is because when I’m doing that the lightning in the picture is bold and extremely bright. And this is definitely something you want when you're taking pictures of lightning. Whereas if you set it into something like F stop 8 or F stop 11, you usually gonna get a pretty weak lightning, lightning bolt in the picture. It’s gonna be thin and not very bright and not very interesting. Now I’m gonna talk about white balance. And when I choose my white balance, I usually choose fluorescent, which is this symbol right here. What the fluorescent does is it brings out the purples and blues that are on the lightning strike and makes a really nice picture. I also use the cloudy mode as well, which makes the lightning blood red and makes basically clouds and everything around it red. And it’s also a very neat feature to use. Now when you’re taking pictures of lightning, you usually never wanna use the white balance setting auto, because what that does is it really gives you dull color and it’s not a very good setting for lightning. Next thing you wanna do is you wanna put your camera completely in manual mode, which means you don’t want any auto focus at all. Because remember, you're gonna be taking this pictures during the night. So not going to be able to auto focus anyway. The way you put it in manual is you switch this little lever over to here, or on the D300, you can just flip this all the way back like this to get manual focus as well. Finally, manually focus your camera and set it into infinity.