Be Excellent To Each Other

How the pissing hell are you supposed to do this?

I set up my D80 last night, on a tripod, pointing outside of my window. I put it on manual mode, set the shutter speed to bulb (so the shutter stays open as long as I want it to), set the focus to infinity and put the camera/lens into manual focus so that it wouldn't try and readjust.

I'd open the shutter at various speeds from f5.6 to f16 and leave it until a lightning strike took place in front of the lens.

I'd then close the shutter and review the photo. Black, every time. Or it'd have a faint silhouette of the buildings in front, but no lightning.

Any idea what I was doing wrong? Would having a UV filter and a circular polarizer on the lens make any difference? I only thought about that this morning.

try another ISO setting? That setup normally gets some results when I've attempted it. My results are crap however, but that probably just because I don't have a nice burning tree already setup in the distance.

Mind I also try taking lots of normal photies if there are lots of lightening as I'll normally pick up one or two pictures. Just have 100000 to delete after.

Use a light activated security camera, connect to a hard drive that records constantly and only saves things when the camera is activated.

Tried all that, the only difference being that I was using f5.6.

Perhaps I should have put my 50mm prime on so that I could have gone down to f1.8 if I needed to.

Oh, and I was shooting at ISO 100 too.

Have you tried photoshopping some lightning into one of your photos?

It's a possibility, certainly Wouldn't quite have the desired effect...

Sounds like your exposures just weren't long enough. How long, on average, were you holding the shutter down?

I was closing the shutter a second or two after a lightning strike, thinking that a massive lightning strike in front of the camera would let enough light in to expose correctly.

On average, probably about 3-8 seconds.

Yeah, I don't want to increase the ISO setting as noise just wouldn't work at all. I must just need to keep it open longer to catch more flashes then.

Will try again in the next storm

Yep. After a couple of test shots, if you find your exposures are too dark after releasing the shutter, just hold it open for a while longer after the lightning strike.

It's all largely trial and error, I guess, at least for the first few shots.

And yeah, I'd avoid increasing your ISO if you can. Not least because it'll shorten your exposures and possibly make you miss some strikes.

I took a trip out to Crosby last night to photograph the sunset over the sea and, somehow halfway through the night, managed to flick my camera over to ISO1600 without realising (I still don't know how. You need to press a button and use the scroll-wheel. I should have twigged on because my exposures were very short, but I'm a retard. So, yeah, all the shots of the best locations with the nicest sky were noisy. I've tried to rescue some of them, but they just aren't as nice as I'd like. I think I'll go back and re-do them.

You may be right. I've never tried capturing lightning before, so I'm only speaking from guesses here.

What's the D80 like for noise? I think most modern DSLRs are quite capable of producing acceptable shots (noise-wise) below about ISO400 are they not?

Depending onlots of things the 8 second shutter speed should reduce noise as it'll have enough time to add light to the area but saying that I've never tried. The web site recommend ISO 200 but a large apature I guess is needed... I am assuming you're taking picture at night?

Yarp. The site I saw recommended ISO 100 and f-stops between 5.6 and 16. Seems this wasn't the best idea.

Perhaps the lightning is just broken!

Your first mistake is taking these shots at night. Timing is critical, but most decent night photography is either done late afternoon or early evening - it's simply too bloody dark within half an hour of sundown to get anything useful without a very very long exposure.

I don't know for certain though, as I have never tried myself, but some thoughts are that lightning is very fast so the idea that having a long exposure would make it blurry is probably not correct, but the main problem is if it's actually dark then there is little or no light other than the light source itself which is the lightning, which at the very least is going to make very uninteresting pictures if you do manage to capture it, if it's even bright enough to show up. Don't forget that you need to double the exposure time for every stop more light you want, so I think exposures running into tens of seconds if not minutes would be quite understandable.

Hell, 8 seconds is only 3 stops longer than 1 second, and it's quite easy to end up with exposures not far off that indoors during the day at 100asa, so I think you're not exposing long enough.

This may not be very helpful as I suspect that there is a limit to what you can do, depending on the quality of the sensor in your camera, but have you tried the per channel settings in Noise Reduction in photoshop? They're buried in the advance settings in Noise Reduction in the Filters drop down. You can't go mad though, as Noise Reduction softens the edge details which you can only pull back so much with sharpening later (otherwise you end up with more noise than when you started). But it might be worth having a try using the corrections on various layers and then playing with the opacity of the layers to control the overall look. Also, bear in mind that PS for reasons only known to itself works better with multiple passes of minor adjustments rather than one big one, if you see what I mean.

Cheers for the advice, though if I can get some nice weather again I'll just go back and re-do them. I'd rather not spend ages salvaging a set of photos when I can easily go back, get it right in-camera the first time, and be much happier with my genuine results.

I remember years ago (possibly 25 or so, I am getting old) being told by numerous buffs and tutors that 200ISO is the best speed for flexibility in film, as in you could underdev the film to 50 or push it to 800 without there being a massive quality loss, whereas you couldn't do that with a slower film - well, you could push it, but it would fall apart quite badly after a couple of stops. While I think about it, a lot of films with titular speed differences that were offered by various manufacturers were actually the same film just processed slightly differently. Strangely enough, it seems as if Nikon are heading in this direction with their sensors, the holy grail to allow a sensor with enough flexibility to truly replicate an analogue camera and the possibility to put any film, as it were, AND more importantly, for it to behave similarly to film.

As for the lightning and shutter speed - it's very difficult to measure the actual luminance of the flash against the background without a very sophisticated spot meter, and that's the balance you're trying to get right, but the overall length of the exposure is more predicated by how dark it is, really as the lightning illumination is but a small focus bright light that only lasts for a split second. As I said earlier, it's probably best not to try and shoot at the dead of night as it's simply too dark to make it practicable to get decent results. The ideal time in this country, this time of year would probably be around 7:30pm to 8:30pm when the light is starting to fail, earlier if it's really overcast, natch.