My first lightning strike

How I captured my first picture of a lightning strike.

It took some experiments until I figured out how to capture a lightning strike.

This is what I did:

• I used the widest lens I own (28 mm) to capture as much sky as possible.
• I set my shutter speed to 30 seconds to increase my chances to capture a lightning strike while the shutter is open.
• I used a tripod to avoid blurry images.
• I used a remote trigger to shoot conveniently many pictures in a row.
• I set my aperture to F2.8 which was too wide open and led to an overexposed image. Next time I’ll try about F5.
• My ISO was 140 (in ISO-Auto-Mode) … next time I’ll set it to fixed 100
• It took me about one hour of continuously shooting the empty sky after I finally captured the lighting strike.

If you would also like to try it, keep in mind that I shot my image at night.
Capturing a lightning strike when the sun is still shining will probably need an entirely different approach.

Originally published at https://while.dev on July 1, 2022.