Lightning while flying
 

Last night's flight was amazing, as the lightning to the right side of the plane was present the whole flight. I tried with ISO 3200 and f1.4 lens, but no way I could capture anything. Anybody able to take a great photo of the lightning? It is also hard to time, as there is no advance warning when there is a big flash or nothing.

From the nikonusa.com site

"One tool I use that helps me achieve this is the Lightning Trigger, a hot shoe-mounted device that plugs into the camera's 10-pin connector port. The lightning trigger causes the shutter to open just when lightning strikes. But: you still need to set ISO, shutter speed, aperture, and white balance. I usually start out by setting my camera to Shutter Priority at 1/4 second, the ISO at 250, white balance to auto, and adjust from there"

Shooting from a plane will be a challenge. Most lightning photography is with an open shutter on a tripod, just waiting. You're not going to be able to react by seeing it. Either a sensor or just shoot a lot and hope you get lucky at some point.

Your exposure settings should be to expose the background as you like. You're never going to be able to "expose" the flash - it's just going to be a white streak.

Well, not so much the flash but as the glow as the light spreads across the sky.

Problem with a shutter speed of 1/4 is that the plane shakes a lot so it is blurry.

This is definitely the problem. A few months ago I was flying DFW-SAN and there was a fantastic rolling storm right out my window. So much lightning I didn't need to guess, just keep shooting and I was bound to capture something.

I must have shot 50 photos, in various setting and I had two problems. First, the lightning was never the same distance from the plane so manual focus was useless. Also, because it was dark out I couldn't focus on the furthest storm could and hope for the best either. The second problem, when lightning was in focus, was the motion of the plane. Even though the ride was perfectly smooth the subtle vibration is like an earthquake at such a low shutter speed.

I think short of having a low altitude photo plane with no window and a professional set-up the only way to capture lightning is pure luck.

No, 1/4s won't work. As I mentioned, you need to shoot for the background. If it's at night, there's not going to be any solution. You can set for a short shutter speed, and spray/pray to get a shot, but you're just going to get a white streak and lit up clouds in the vicinity of the flash. Everything else will be black. A long shutter speed to expose the ground will just generate a long blur.

Manual focus is easy IMO - set it at infinity since you're going to have the aperture so wide that you don't really focus anywhere else.


I purposely slowed it down to get more of the effect of the light in the video. That was a great flight. :cool: