Metal doesn’t attract lightning (that’s a myth) but it will conduct it. Attach an intervalometer or lightning trigger to the camera to eliminate any potential camera shake. Being under an object like a tree puts you at risk for a side flash, which is when the lightning strikes a taller object and a portion of the current jumps to you. Shooting in a thunderstorm is actually pretty dangerous. Avoid autofocus, it won’t be very effective here. Lightning is least common along the Pacific coast. Capturing it in a way that makes an effective photograph takes practice and experience. Capturing a lightning strike takes a fair amount of both preparation and plain ole luck. If you end up wanting to actually built a time lapse from all of your frames, and not just pluck out individual winning frames, know that 30 individual frames will equate to about 1 second of cinematic footage – so you need a lot of frames to make up a decently-lengthed time lapse video. If you’re not doing that, don’t worry about it. Here are some tips!When it comes to creating images that are dynamic, exciting, and eye catching, it’s hard to beat storm photography. So if you happen to get unlucky enough (or lucky enough depending on your appetite for risk) to have your car struck, it will go through the frame and into the ground. How to Stay Safe When Shooting Lightning Photography. Places to avoid are being under a tree or any kind of pole or tall structure.There are certain wrong notions that wearing shoes with thick rubber insulation or using a non-metallic tripod are going to keep you safe. This type of lightning makes for particularly appealing pictures, but it’s less common. Lightning may also stay within the same cloud, obscuring the actual bolt, but can light up the cloud in interesting ways that you might be able to composite into other shots.Cloud-to-cloud lightning (or intra-cloud lightning) is much more common than cloud-to-ground lightning.Start your shoot knowing that you might end up with only cloud-to-cloud lightning and how you want to try and make that interesting. That’s safe, right? Since lightning is extremely fast, (30 microseconds or 30/1000000s) you must be quick. Lightning is dramatic, extremely fast, a challenge to photograph and potentially dangerous. Cloud-to-cloud lightning (also called intra-cloud lightning) happens more frequently and can be incredibly dramatic, particularly if the lightning bolts are heavily forked, but you might not have that compositional option. It’s really hard to predict just how bright these strikes can be. Lightning tends to strike tall things, pointy things, and, well, isolated things. To photograph lightning during the day: Setup your camera on a tripod. Remember, though, that these things can conduct. Alexandria Huff's photography and lighting tutorials can be found on Turn your creative vision into reality with If you’re doing lightning photography “safely”, then it’ll be from far away. While you always hear tips about counting the seconds between rumbles and strikes, know that hearing thunder at all could mean lightning is close enough to strike you. Firstly, there’s the obvious task of finding where the lightning will strike, and next is the incredibly important measures you should take to ensure your safety while shooting. Well, it gets scarier: ground current. There is no rule against it – it’s just that it’ll probably be more, well, boring of a shot if you just only capture lightning without any context.A collection of links to help give you the resources you need to shoot lightning as safely as possible:Here on our blog, you’ll find inspirational content, reviews, tutorials and BL updates all geared to help your creative production.Ready to get to work? But photographers get amazing shots all the time and you want in on the action. Well, no. Turn off any image stabilization your lens may have. If shooting from a distance less than 6 miles, it's best to do so from within a building or car. Lightning is incredibly dangerous. You can still get great landscape shots.For this reason, it might not actually be the best tactic to use your wide angle lens, despite it maybe being your normal go-to for landscapes. Technique. It can happen when you’re around a foot or so from the struck object. It is best to stay inside a building, car, or other object that can protect from a direct strike. So what’s the leading cause?
There are a number of apps as well as resources from the National Weather Service that track storms and can help you predict when lightning is going to happen. Lightning simply is just not a zero-risk phenomena. This can include finding really interesting foreground subjects so that you can at least get a dramatic vista.Technically, no outside space is fully safe when lightning is occurring. Not to get too scary, but lightning … 1. When the gap between the flash and thunder starts reducing, you should know that the lightning is getting closer and when the delay is about four seconds, you should start moving to a safer place.The place which is considered to be the safest in a lightning storm is your car. While you always hear tips about counting the seconds between rumbles and strikes, know that hearing thunder at all could mean lightning is close enough to strike you. In lightning photography, there is always quite a bit of risk involved as this natural phenomena is very unpredictable. Lightning is almost completely unpredictable, so you want to control what you can in order to walk away successfully. The first is that you need to have a realistic expectation of what’s going to actually happen out there. Lightning is incredibly awesome, fun to photograph, and surprisingly easy to photograph. Stay away from any metal railings. Infinity focus on your lens is a quick solution but not fool-proof. These measures are definitely not enough to insulate you from something as powerful as lightning, and you should pay more attention to the main safety tips.In the unfortunate event of a lightning strike, the person usually is not killed immediately but suffers from the stoppage of breathing or a heartbeat. Maybe you want a nice, open area to shoot from for good coverage of the sky? If you’re out in the open, the best bet is to keep moving, which is not at all conducive to contemplative landscape photography.Really one of the safest places to be other than at home is in your car.