Shooting skills of lightning

In summer, thunder and lightning are frequent. This also provides many photographers with creative opportunities. Shooting lightning seems to be an advanced channel for beginners, but in fact, as long as you master a little skill and practice more, there will always be an excellent lightning photo that belongs to you! Let's take a brief look at how to shoot lightning!

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

As we all know, 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.

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.

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.

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.