Lightning Photography

One beautiful form of photography that I personally love is lightning photography. It is something that I want to capture at some point, but I had no idea how photographers capture these amazing lightning shots. I found an article (linked below) that explains how it is done.

The writer of this article covers all his recommendations for capturing photographs of lightning. I will go over some of his recommendations, the ones that are not obvious and the more important ones. First, he says to set it to manual focus and set it to infinity because the lightning will cause issues with the autofocus sensor and it will make sure all the lightning is in focus. Next, he talks about timing and recommends using bulb mode and holding the shutter open until the lightning strikes and closing it immediately after the strike ends and also recommends using the mirror lock-up feature. He then discusses composure where he recommends having something in the shot for scale/perspective. Other than bulb mode he says to set the iso to 200 for a less noisy image and since it's in low-light conditions to use a shallow depth-of-field like f/2.8-f5.6. In terms of equipment, he recommends a wide-angle lens, a sturdy tripod, and a cable release to keep your touch from shaking the camera.

This all made sense to me except that I would have thought that a long exposure would make the lightning nothing but a white blur. The other thing I did not understand was what exactly mirror lock-up is. He included a picture that I really like because it has great composure using the houses as perspective, is sharp because the exposure is down at 2 seconds, and lists the settings he used.

https://www.exposureguide.com/lightning-photography-tips/