Blog of Kim Loon

I find that taking photo of lightning bolt is a very difficult task. We need to be at the right place, right time and right equipment.

Lightning occurs very fast. Before we can react to snap, the lightning is over. To me, taking photo of lightning bolt was like a gamble. We have to snap before the lightning strike.

I had attempted to take photos of the lightning before on a stormy night, but without any success. I remembered very clearly, that evening, I saw a lot of lightning flash. But I could not tell the actual direction where the lightning was occurring.

I could only point my camera in a general direction which I believe was the lightning storm. It was a fruitless attempt.

Few evening ago, it was another thunder storm. This time, I could see the lightning bolt with my naked eyes. I quickly set up my tripod and camera with my quick release control.

I was not sure what setting to use. I used Tv mode to check the aperture to use. From there, I switched to full manual mode, using the setting previously found with a -2 Ev. I also set the camera to continuously shooting. I used the quick release to lock the shooting. That means that I would continuously shooting photos.

It was quite fortunate that the lightning was quite often that evening. This allowed me to change my setting along the way. I found the exposure of 4 sec, aperture of f/9.0 and ISO 400 gave me the best effect. Or maybe, it was because I was not so lucky when I was trying other settings.

Anyway, out of over 130 photos, I managed to get some nice photos. I am wondering, how people take photos of lightning in the days of using film.

These are the better ones of the lightning photos.