Lightning storm

Summer is almost here, and with it comes lightning storms. I have always loved the drama of these intense electrical cloud-to-cloud or cloud-to-ground discharges. At night, lightning is easy to photograph. Simply put your camera on a tripod, focus on a distant light on manual focus mode, open the shutter for 30 seconds, use f/8 and an ISO of 400, and if there is no lightning, reopen the shutter again. Repeat this until the storm passes, and if you've aimed the lens in the right direction, you'll capture something great. If there are no lights on which you can focus, set the camera up at dusk and focus on distant landforms when you can see them. I use a focal length of about 150mm. A wide angle makes the bolts look too small, too far away. A longer lens is too narrow and you can easily miss the part of the sky where the action is. For daylight storms, since you can't leave the shutter open for a long time, you have to be either very lucky or use a lightning trigger. These devices fit into the hot shoe of the camera and trip the shutter when lightning is detected. If bolts of lightning occur in the presence of cumulus clouds, that creates very dramatic imagery. With a daylight WB setting, lightning photographs magenta.