How To Photograph Lightning

*** Note: This is a How To Photograph Lightning from 1999, long before the latest digital camera's. The idea is the same but some of the setups on the camera will be a little different. ***

Before you even try to read this I have to go over a few camera basics.

What is an F-Stop?

An f-stop is also known as the iris of the camera. It controls how much light is let into the camera body to reach the film.

What is emulsion or film speed?

The emulsion on the film is the key to all film. Without getting to technical it is what captures the image on the film when you click the button on the camera to open the shutter. Emulsion also has to do with the size of the actual pixel or grain of the finished photograph. If you were to use a film such as Kodak Royal Gold 25 speed film and then use a Kodak Royal Gold 1000 speed film and have two photographs made that were 11 inches by fourteen inches you could see the difference. 

The photo using the Kodak Royal Gold 25 speed film would look sharper then the 1000 speed film. This has to do with the make up of the emulsion on the film. The lower the number rating such as 100 means that you need more light to activate all of the emulsion particles on the film where as a 1000 speed film works in less light. In short, there are different films for different uses. A simple rule to remember about film is the lower the number the more light you will need to activate the full spectrum of the emulsion.

Most cameras that you see in the stores such as Target And Walmart are automatic or known as point and shoot cameras. Those cameras don’t give you much control over them except for zooming in with a built in telephoto lens, which brings you closer to the subject and or just a flash to use in poor lighting. Don’t try to storm chase or photograph lightning with those piece of crap low budget cameras!

There are also several different formats of cameras. The first two camera formats, Digital and APS are a waste of your money if you buy them for anything other then photographing your family.

Digital cameras work much like the point and shoot cameras except that they store the image on a computer chip, computer disk or in some cases a miniature compact disk. In order to get quality digital images your going to have to pay quality money for the good cameras. Some Digital's can do great lightning but this page is more for the person just starting out to learn how to photograph lightning.

APS or Advance Photo System cameras, which use film in a APS format case that you simply insert into your camera are pathetic excuses for a camera because it uses a film that is so small that anything you would want to do other then four inch by six inch photographs will look bad. The reason for this is that the APS cameras use a smaller film then a film such as a 35mm film. 

In general, any camera you buy should be able to have multiple lens options. What this means is that you can remove the lens from the camera and put a new one on in a few seconds. This way you can swap out a 50mm lens for a 200mm lens to zoom in on a subject or step down to a 28mm lens for a wider field of view. The length of the lens can be confused sometimes with the film size due to the fact that everything in photography works on the metric system. The simple way to remember the number system with the lenses is the smaller the number the wider the field of view. Anything below a 28mm lens you start to distort the image that your seeing and get what is called a fish eye effect that warps the image and bends the light waves that pass through the lens. Keep in mind that the human eye views images at about a 85mm focal length. The next three cameras work much better:

35mm manual camera with interchangeable lenses

120 or also known as Medium Format cameras with or without interchangeable lenses

And Field Cameras which generally have a fixed lens due to there size.

The manual 35mm camera with interchangeable lenses as discussed above works great for just about anything that most photographers would need. The next step up, the 120 or medium format camera has a lot more options but is priced out of reach for most people since you can buy a good used car for the price of a good 120 camera. The reason it is called 120 or medium format is due to the size of the negative or slide produced. Since there are three general classes of cameras, 120 cameras fall in the middle so they are called medium format. As in 35mm film, the size of the negative is defined by the width of the image and the size of the film. With medium format cameras the size of the image captured on the emulsion is more then FOUR TIMES the size of the 35mm image.

What this is good for is if you want to enlarge the image. In most cases if you were to enlarge a 35mm image past the size of say twenty inches by twenty four inches the photo will start to look grainy even if you used a real slow speed film like a Kodak Royal Gold 25. It has to do with how much image there is to start with and the grain of the film you used. .The smaller the image the less resolution you have to start with to increase the size of the image.

Now with a negative or slide from a 120 camera, your base image is nearly four times that of a 35mm image. Any enlargement from the larger base image will provide you with a finer resolution for the larger printed image's.

With a field camera, the image is again 4 times larger. The size of the negative or slide is four inches by five inches. Needless to say, the expense of the film alone is cost prohibitive to even professional photographers unless they are well paid and doing work in the advertising field for printed commercials. Even then most of the work is done on the 120 format cameras.

And last but not least the different types of film.

C41 and E6 are the names that are used in the industry but seldom used buy the average person going in and picking up a roll of film at a discount store. If you walked into Target and asked the clerk for a roll of 24 exposure 400 E6 they would like at you like a deer in headlights. C41 is the chemical makeup of the developing process for the color negative film and E6 is the chemical makeup for the slide film. Without going into a 10-page process of the different chemical compositions just remember C41 is print film and E6 is slide projector film. 

I use only two still film cameras for my photography. The first camera is a 75-year-old Ciro Flex 120 format. With the 120-format camera I normally use it for a back up due to the fact that it only has a fixed power of 85mm. I can adjust the f-stop up to 22 and leave the shutter open indefinitely should I want to.

The second camera is a Canon Rebel. With the Canon Rebel I can constantly meter for changing light levels with the changing cloud formations. I use Fuji film for most of my work but I am not sponsored by them.

For my video footage I use Sony PD 170 DV CAM and a Sony VX 2100 which are some of the best 3CCD cameras ever made. With video it is a whole other story that we can dive into with the different formats but in general, any video camera with a manual focus option will work for storm chasing. Just as long as you don’t say anything stupid on video, keep it on a tripod and don’t keep zooming in and out to the point where the viewer gets sea sick you should be fine with working with any video format.

"Update" 10/2005 I also now use a Nikon D70s, it is a cool camera and the digital equipment is finally good enough for what I want to do, but film is still the best for tweaking stuff to get the shots in the first place. Digital is great for post processing.

Photographing Lightning is easy and very difficult. Every photographer must first do two things before attempting to photograph lightning. The first is to sign your life away. Hey this stuff is very dangerous and can kill you in the blink of an eye. Come on, Skydiving is a lot safer than photographing lightning. The second thing is to forget everything you ever learned about photography before you started reading this.

I never took a photography class in my life until the fall 1998 Semester at college where I ended up helping teach half the class to use the darkroom since the professor wanted to kick me out because I always corrected her. I learned all of what I know about photography through trial and error and then going to work part time in the photo labs. Nobody ever wrote a how to manual on photographing lightning until I wrote my first version of this back in 1998.

To photograph lightning, you must first under stand what is lightning. Not the technical term, but its optical term. Lightning is Light. This is where every photographer goes down the wrong path. When photographing outdoors in the sunlight you would not use a 400 or a 1000 speed film because of the natural available light. Lightning is light! It is the biggest flash bulb in the world that lasts almost as long as a flash bulb on a camera. But its not a very good flash bulb.

When photographing lightning you do not want to use a film any faster then 100 speed film. I use Fuji 50 to 100 speed films and I prefer Fuji film to Agfa and Kodak due to the colors. I have found that Kodak and Agfa give me a dark and brownish orange color where as Fuji is more in the bright white and blue, which is perfect for, lightning. Although sometimes if I get a good deal on some closed out Kodak Royal Gold 25 ASA film that has been kept cool over the years, I will play around with that. The 25-speed film did give you some funky colors but when trying to photography lightning in a very bright city at night it worked good.

When setting up for the storm the next mistake every photographer makes it metering for the lightning. Why meter for one hundred million volts over ten miles long that is hotter than the surface of the sun and only lasts for a fraction of a second? You’re not really trying to photograph the lightning any ways but the natural light and the scenery.

As the first image shows, lightning is bright but not bright enough to light up the fore ground to the point where it is visible.

The best images come when you meter the f-stop for the available light. This means that if your in a city you will want to pick out the brightest source of light and the dimmest source of light then try to get somewhere safe in the middle. The whole trick of photographing lightning is to balance the the image for the natural light.

As in the image shows, this is a perfectly balanced image.  The lightning is vivid and stands out with all the detail you want and the foreground is visible to the point where you can see what is there, an airplane.

With my Canon Rebel that I use, it has a built in computer system that helps you out with balancing the f-stop out. You need to find the right f-stop for the right setting for the right amount of time.

So forget about the lightning and think, how am I going to get that image of the airplane in the distance with only the natural available light? 

Here you can see the what the inside of the view finder should look like.  The exposure time for this shot is setup for 30 seconds.  This is with my hand in front of the lens with very little light entering the camera lens.  The F-Stop is set to 11 and the <-+> exposure meter shows that the photo is in perfect balance for a 30 second photo at F11 or F-Stop 11.   But since this photo was take using my digital camera, you can't see the and in front of the camera.

Here is a view of the top of the camera

Here is a view of the top of the camera. On the left you can see that the camera settings is set to M or Manual Mode. On the right in the LCD Display you can see the settings. The various Canon Cameras have different ways to set this up so you will need to learn your own camera. On the LCD screen you see that the light balance meter is in balance. If it was not in balance it would have a <- for under exposed or a +> for over exposed image. The F-Stop for this image shows a F32 for a 30 second exposure. 

Once you have your F-Stop in balance for the natural light, the lightning will take care of the rest. One thing you will need to watch out for is the reflection of the street lights on your lens. You should use a Lens Hood for the front of your camera. The street lights if photographed at an angle will leave streaks on your negative, so try to get as far away or above the streetlights as you can.

Once you have found the perfect field of view with a storm approaching or passing you by, you will need to see how long you can open your shutter for. Unless you are very fast at pushing a button you will miss every bolt of lightning. You will want to meter the camera lens for the longest time and factor in the background buildings and street lights. Depending on where you are sitting, your f-stop will never be the same for lightning photography due to the cloud base. 

The base of the cloud layer above the ground can add or subtract your background lighting and can mess up your f-stop if your in a city due to the reflection of the city lights off the clouds. The clouds act like a mirror with street lights. The lower the clouds the less light they will bounce off in a wider area but the more concentrated the light will be in one spot. 

So in short, balance your natural light for the amount of time you can get out of your camera. I do suggest that you do not try this with older camera's that just have a bulb setting. To get the best shots of lightning you need a good camera such as a Canon Rebel SLR or Canon Elan SLR brand cameras, which has the light metering system built right into the camera.

I use my 35-80 lens that came with my camera for most of my photographs. Some chasers like a nice telephoto lens that can bring them to a storm while sitting in a nice safe place. Hey there is nothing wrong with playing it safe but your going to miss the good photos if you don't take a chance.

Here are two examples of different images with and without a telephoto lens.  Both images were taken within 30 minutes of each other and both to the untrained eye look very powerful.  The first image you notice the lightning but do you notice the color?  The bolt of lightning that hit within 200 yards of where I was standing.

The dust in the atmosphere causes the brownish color of the lightning since I was zoomed in on this image from about 5 miles away.  This image was taken with my camera using my 35-80 lens using 100 speed film.  I leave the lens on the 35mm focal length mark for the widest angle without a distortion of the image.  Don't get me wrong, I also have a 28mm-200mm lens but that one only gets used at 28 for the real wide angles from time to time or zoomed in for tornado chasing. Most of the time it stays home any ways since I don't like to fuss with it.

Once again I must warn you, photographing lightning can kill you! Several people die each year on golf courses all over the country from lightning strikes. Tall parking ramps are not much safer. When photographing lightning you need the perfect spot. This means in a wide-open area where you are normally the highest object. For the beginner a good local parking ramp that is higher than the tree line is safer than standing outside if you stay on the level below the top. 

You will need accurate weather radar data and several back up sites to photograph from because the storms do change direction. If you are going to do any photography or video and its on private property, its good to scout out the location ahead of time and contact the owner for permission to be on their property to do the photography. If you don’t, most places that you will want to photograph lightning from will kick you out or call the police on you when the storms just start to become perfect for photographing.

I recommend bringing at least one brick of film just to be safe (20 rolls). Sometimes the storms can come in waves, known as training storms. This is where the outflow from the previous storms causes a new storm trailing the previous storm to form a line of storms like a train, hence training storms. So it looks as if the storms are moving along like a train and your in for several hours of storms to get that perfect shot. There is nothing worse than running out of film when the good lightning comes.

Mother Nature like any good model has a good side and a bad side. The good side is easy to find. All you have to do is wait for it. The best lightning images are always taken before or after the storm passes by.

Once you have mastered taking photographs of lightning at night try your hand at taking some photographs of lightning during the day. If you can capture the lightning during the day, you have then and only then become a true lightning photographer.

You must hope for a storm front a half-hour before sun set. Photographing storms during the daylight hours is next to impossible. I have managed to be able to master daylight lightning photos but it took a lot of film and time trying to get a daylight lightning photo thing to work. Here is an example of a daylight lightning photo.  It looks a lot different then the night time photos since you can see something that is not in a lot of other photographers work, green grass.

One of the tricks that I use for photographing lightning during the day is to take a 50 or 100-speed film and program the camera to think that I’m using a film speed of 6. 

What this does is tell the camera that I need a lot of light to activate all of the emulsion on the film but what this is really doing is over exposing the film to such a degree that your film will normally come out almost black if you don’t correct for it in processing.

To pull off the daylight photography like I just explained you need to know a lot about photography and about pushing or pulling the film in processing stage of the developing of the film. It is a little known trick that can be done to film called push or pull, which is being for gotten about since everyone is going digital and point and shoot. Since I worked in several Pro Photo Labs and taught myself how to develop color negative or C41 and color slide or E6 film, I learned these tricks to use on my own. To push your film means to have the photo lab or yourself if you’re processing the film by hand, to add extra time to the developing stage of the processing of the film. For this example I will discuss the processing of C41 color negative film.

What pushing will do is if your film is under exposed, it will cause the chemical reaction between the developer to extend over the normal processing time which for just about every photo lab in the country is 3:30 (Three Minutes, Thirty Seconds) before the film is put into another chemical solution which is called a bleach bath or stop bath. What the bleach bath does is counter act the chemical reaction of the developing chemicals so that the developer chemicals will not over process the film.

Once the film has gone through the bleach solution which is not a bleach solution such as Laundry Bleach but a photo bleach chemical solution, the film is then transported into a water bath solution to rinse all the chemicals off of it. The water bath is just that, water which rinses away any of the chemicals left over from the bleach bath. After the film has been rinsed and all of the chemicals are now removed from the film, the film can be exposed to natural light. The images you shot are now developed and the developing process is almost completed now.

The film is still wet from the water bath and needs to dry off for a few minutes then put into a final chemical solution called a fix solution. What the fix solution does is cause one more chemical reaction to the film,which will harden the film to help prevent dust and other scratches from damaging the film. After the film has gone through the fix solution for several minutes it is then transported to the dryer. In the drier the film is dried of the moisture that it has just received so that you can touch it without leaving a lasting fingerprint on the film like stepping in wet cement. When shooting daylight day light lightning you are going to over expose the film a lot.

So you need to do what is called a pull to the film. The film is processed with the normal developing time cut by up to 1/3 of what it should be. When you ask a professional photo lab to do this they will look at you like your crazy. Just tell them, trust me, I know what I’m talking about. The might have you sign a waver saying that they are not responsible for your film if it does not turn out since nobody every pulls 1/3 off the processing time of the film. Last but not least. “LOCATION LOCATION LOCATION.” 

When ever you’re out cruising around in your car always keep an eye out for different locations that you think might be a good location to photograph lightning from. If you get somewhere that has a storm coming but can’t find a place to park it’s just as bad as running out of film when the storm is looking good. You will also want to bring something to eat and drink along with and a lot of patience because you will more than likely get skunked when you find the perfect spot then the storm falls apart while you waited several hours for something to get to the storm or the storm to you. Photographing lightning takes time to get right. I got lucky when I started photographing lightning. It was the first time I ever used a camera that was not a point and shoot camera. I just remembered what I did and back engineered it.

Just remember to learn as much as you can about the weather so you will know what is happening in the sky so you know what it is you’re photographing. Websites such as http://www.weather.com, http://www.rap.ucar.edu and http://www.spc.noaa.gov or http://weather.edu.cod and even a pay site such as http://www.weathertap.com will provide you with a lot of data of the current and forecasted weather so you will have an idea of what is forecasted and where you may want to plan on going to so you can see the weather. But only with time and experience will you know what to look for in the sky while your out in the field and for that you will need to take a few courses on meteorology.

I highly recommend that anyone that wants to start storm chasing take a Sky Warn training course