The footsteps of lightning

Lightning is an elusive beast that many photographers can't control. After reading it, you will find that you can also find and capture it like a professional photographer. Then, let me introduce you to the steps of shooting lightning.

The steps of shooting lightning 1 and the safety problems in shooting.

First of all, you should remember that ensuring your own safety is the first priority, and lightning is very dangerous! Not only lightning is dangerous, but also the ensuing heavy rain and hail.

You should be very clear about this and be fully prepared. You can find relevant articles on the Internet to learn about safety knowledge.

Shooting lightning Step 2: Find lightning.

I won't write much about this part, because there are countless information about finding lightning.

Lightning forecast, you can go to the website of the local meteorological department to check. Once you feel that you have a chance to photograph lightning, you can try to find the local radar weather map to predict the route, process and dissipation point of the storm.

Step 3: shoot lightning.

After knowing the path of the storm, we will start preparing for shooting. Many people only focus on shooting lightning and ignore the composition of the photos. After knowing the location of lightning, you should choose a suitable composition to ensure that even if there is no lightning, it is a good photo.

In this way, once lightning strikes the ground, the effect will be much better. When lightning strikes, it is best for photographers not to stand in an open place and put an open metal tripod beside them, which is very unsafe.

You can use the remote shutter at this time. After the camera is set, set it to continuous shooting mode, and then wait in a safer place.

When shooting lightning, people usually mistakenly expose the whole scene and ignore the light brought by lightning. In fact, there are many similarities between shooting lightning and shooting with a flash. Most of the light in the photo comes from lightning, not from the surrounding light sources.

Set the exposure time of the camera to 20-30 seconds. If there is no lightning at this time, the photo should be completely black. For me, the appropriate settings are f/7, ISO 100, and 30-second exposure. This setting is suitable for shooting lightning with very strong power and very close distance. Another set of f/5, ISO 100, 30-second exposure settings is more suitable for shooting distant lightning.

You can take a few photos before shooting to test and find the correct settings. Several photos in this tutorial were taken under the settings of f/7, ISO 100 and 30 seconds, so I think you can start with this setting.

To shoot lightning, you may need the lens with the shortest focal length at hand. Try to keep the horizon as low as possible when shooting, but focus on the sky when shooting interesting scenes. Most lightning occurs in the air.

In addition to setting manual exposure, pay attention to setting the focus to manual mode. Take some pictures of distant objects before taking pictures, knowing that these objects are clear and sharp. Usually, the distance should be set close to infinity to make the lightning light clear.

The fourth step of shooting lightning: editing photos.

If you have never used the camera's RAW format to shoot before, you must also use it when shooting lightning. Because of the uncertainty of lightning intensity, the photos taken basically need post-processing to look good.

Some lightning is very bright, others are very dark, so it is difficult for the camera to find the correct white balance by itself. If you still save photos in JPEG format at this time, the post-processing will be much more difficult and the effect will be far less than that in RAW format.