How to photograph lightning.
Originally published in Rangefinder Magazine, ©Bill Koplitz
Thunderstorms are one of the most common occurring phenomena in nature - and one of the least photographed. Estimates of the number of lightning flashes around the world during a typical 24 hours are 8.5 million times or 600 flashes per second.
It seems like there should be thousands of great lightning photographs, but there aren’t. According to one stock photography company based in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, good lightning photographs are still rare and the really great photos get used over and over again. Lightning seems to be one of the least photographed weather events.
When people ask me how to photograph lightning I sometimes joke and say, “wear sneakers.” But sneakers won’t help protect you from a lightning strike. A few summers ago two people were killed while walking on the beach in Sarasota, Florida. Near one of the bodies was a smoldering tennis sneaker. There were several witnesses who said that the storm’s squall line was over a mile away when the people were struck.
What happens during a lightning strike is still poorly understood. The electrical charges build up within the cloud because of friction. Once these charges have reached a certain saturation point the cloud sends out a leader, or leaders, to the ground. This leader, or pilot, is a stream of charged particles that establishes an open conductive channel to the earth. The flash happens on the return stroke, the lightning leaps from the ground through this ionized channel back to the cloud.
I learned to photograph lightning by photographing a series of storms and testing my results. Luckily, central Florida is the top place in the United States, and one of the top five places in the world, for violent electrical thunder storms.
Anyone who understands the basic principles of photography and owns a 35mm camera and a tripod can take lightning photographs. Great pictures are a fortunate blend of being in the right place at the right time. I have several photographs that have sold over and over again because I was lucky. The luck came because I have tried to photograph many storms.
All my lightning photographs are time exposures made at night with 35mm equipment on a tripod and a 50mm, or “normal”, lens. Most of the heavy lightning activity is within the storm and inside the rain line. I try to stay on the outside of the rain and shoot back into the lightning. I’m usually in the path of the moving storm and as it comes near I keep moving away. I have made my best photographs when I was just beginning to get wet from the rain.
These are violent thunder storms with audible thunder and visible lightning. They develop from warm, moist, unstable air rising to the cooler upper reaches of the atmosphere.
The lightning “flash” is estimated to be 1″ in diameter, luminous for 100/millionth of a second, have a temperature of 30,000 C and travel at 90,000 miles per second or half the speed of light. Bolts can be as short as 200 feet or as large as 20 miles. Lightning contains an enormous quantity of electrical energy, up to 500,000 amps and 125 million volts. If I’m not close enough to the storm to be afraid of the lightning I’m probably too far away.
I look for the area in the squall line that has the most electrical activity and position the camera and put the shutter speed at B (bulb). I then look through the camera at a few strikes so I can level the camera to the horizon and focus on the most active area. I start my bracket at f/4 by opening the shutter until I have one or two cloud to ground and cloud to cloud bolts recorded on the film. I then close the shutter, advance the film, and go to the next aperture, or f/stop, f/5.6.
The B (bulb) setting keeps the shutter open while you hold down the shutter release, or button. When you stop holding down the button, the shutter closes. I use an air release with a screw lock for long exposures (over 5 minutes) to help insure camera steadiness. I never use any of the camera’s long exposure settings because they are usually too short.
Using the B setting I’ve had the shutter open for more than twenty minutes while I filled in the foreground with electronic flash or gone back to the car for an umbrella. There is never any reason to close the shutter until there is a strike or two within the field. After a few minutes your eyes get used to the darkness and even faint lighting looks bright. Wait for a good strike. Little will be recorded on your film unless the flash is bright enough to scare you.
The quality of light is brilliant and hard. The stroke itself will record with some red and yellows but the indirect light, from clouds and ocean, or the ground, will be distinctly blue to violet. Choose a film that has little reciprocity failure (color shift during very long or short exposures) so that you won’t have to hold filters in front of the lens in the dark.
Thunderstorms are the most powerful electrical phenomenon in nature. Each year lightning accidentally kills 500 people and injures another 2,000. If you are threatened, don’t go under a tree, one third of the people who lose their lives by a lightning strike are under a tree. Get back in your car or in a house. If your hair is standing up you are in extreme danger and you must take action by getting into the “lightning crouch”; put your feet together, squat down, tuck your head and cover your ears and hope that the leader finds a higher object.