I recently had one of my lightning photos featured on National Geographic, and people have been commenting with things like 'great timing!' or just asking how a shot like this is accomplished - so here's a post explaining the process of capturing lightning on camera.
It doesn't actually involve lightning-fast reflexes (haha see what I did there haha) at all, or any kind of sensor or trigger - quite the opposite; it involves patience!
Lightning is captured using a slow shutter speed for a long exposure shot.
Here's the exif info for this particular photo;
Focal Length: 18 mm
Shutter Speed: 25/1 sec
Aperture: f/5.6
ISO: 100
It was a 25 second exposure with a low ISO to keep it grain-free, and an appropriate aperture to let enough light in with that combination of shutter speed and ISO. If you're doing this yourself, set it up and then run some test shots to get your exposure levels right; depending on how much ambient light you have in your area, you may need different settings to those above.
I pointed the camera in the direction that most of the lightning was coming from, made sure I had some frame of reference for context of scale in the shot (the little lights on the shore on the right-hand side and some ocean visible in the foreground), and then pressed the shutter.
I waited 25 seconds, and if no lightning happened in-frame during those 25 seconds, I hit the shutter again.
And again.
And again.
I was at the beach for an hour - and it was actually the second time I'd tried for lightning shots that day; the first time, as soon as I got to the beach it started raining and blowing a gale, getting droplets all over the lens and battering the tripod, with rain so thick it was obscuring the lightning bolts. I got some shots of the rough ocean, then went home and thought that was that - fortunately the storm picked up again later in the day and didn't bring the rain with it, so I was able to try again. During that hour of shooting, I got maybe five decent photos with lightning in them, and maybe fifty that had nothing, or lightning too far away to be very visible.
I got really lucky with this shot. A bolt of lightning not just perfectly in-frame, but also a triple fork, and near enough to be nicely in the foreground and light up half of the sky.
The gear used was a Nikon D7000 with the kit 18-55mm lens (at 18mm for this shot) and a sturdy tripod. It was processed in Adobe Lightroom (tweaked for colour balance, saturation, etc. - the lightning provided the blue glow on the left, and the ambient light from the street lights and buildings on the right provided the orange glow over the right-hand side).
Since these are long-exposure shots (and can be longer than 25 seconds - whatever you feel like trying), you may get lucky enough to get several bolts of lightning in one photo; and if you're shooting the same composition without changing the camera direction at all, essentially taking the same photo over and over again, you can even combine the photos with lightning in into one photo using Photoshop's photomerge feature.
And that's it! The next time there's a thunderstorm in your area, get out and get snapping :D
