What are the lightning shooting techniques for capturing light and shadow?

Shooting lightning is an advanced skill for beginners. So what lightning shooting techniques do you know to capture light and shadow moments? Let's have a look!

1. Be safe.

Take a lightning photo, first of all, pay attention to safety. Don't stand in the lightning range or on the high ground, or you may lose your life!

2. Long exposure

Lightning appears randomly and irregularly, so it is impossible to press the shutter when you see lightning. In order to solve this problem, we will make a long exposure, and the settings are as follows:

Set up a tripod

In manual mode, set the camera to B shutter /T shutter.

Set the ISO to the lowest, such as ISO 100 or 200.

Adjust the aperture according to the distance of lightning, such as far lightning f/5.6, middle lightning f/8 and near lightning f/1. Take a few photos and you will know how many apertures are used.

Focus to manual focus and infinite focus.

When shooting, aim the lens at the place where lightning is expected to appear (including the foreground/background), open the B shutter /T shutter, and then wait for lightning to appear.

Remember that if there is light in the foreground/background, you should calculate the best exposure time yourself, neither too long nor too short.

You need to set the ISO to the lowest level when shooting.

3. Coordination of prospect/background

If only lightning is included, the photo may become too monotonous. At this time, we can add foreground or background to the photos to make them more imposing! Examples of foreground/background are streets at night, seaside beaches, landmarks, etc.

Taking buildings as the foreground can make photos more impactful.

Streets at night can also be used as foreground.

Adjust white balance

Just like shooting at night, we can add color to the night sky by adjusting the white balance. Colors such as purple and blue can add atmosphere to photos. Of course, you can go home and adjust the white balance after shooting the RAW file.

Turn the photo purple by adjusting the white balance.

Turn down the white balance to make the photo look cool.

5. Multiple exposure

If we want to take multiple lightning shots in the same photo, we can use the multiple exposure function of the camera to take two exposures in the same photo, so that we can take lightning shots in different positions!

Multiple exposures can capture lightning at different locations.

Multiple exposures captured multiple lightning.

Lightning doesn't happen very often, so we need to pay more attention to some safe places where lightning can be photographed on weekdays. If lightning happens, pick up the camera and tripod and set off! One more thing, lightning often rains. Don't forget to waterproof the camera when shooting, then clean it and put it in the moistureproof box for maintenance.