Lightning
How to shoot it:
First and foremost, find yourself a safe, dry location to shoot from, I don’t want to hear from someone’s lawyer that my how-to guide got them BBQ’d. Inside a building or vehicle works best, which sometimes poses a challenge as lightning doesn’t always neatly appear right outside your window. Although sometimes it does, as was the case with these photos. Alas, you can still get great shots through a telephoto.
Lightning is too quick to respond to, you’ll need to be setup with shutter open, hoping to get that perfect bzot within your frame. A tripod and all manual settings are a must. Clamp your camera into the tripod, frame the scene and focus manually.
Use an ISO of 100 and try large to medium aperture settings. For most cameras, an aperture between 7 and 11 will yield the sharpest image as those settings utilize the best part of the lens, but too small a setting will actually block the lightning. Remember, aperture numbers are inversely proportional to the amount of light allowed to enter the camera. For example, f3.5 is a larger iris opening (and therefore brighter) than f9.0.
Depending on the ambient light, use the longest possible shutter time that doesn’t result in an over-exposed background. Keep shooting until you capture some bolts. It may take 50 or more exposures just to get one good bzot. That’s the great thing about digital, it doesn’t cost us extra to click-a-lot.
Layering in Photoshop: Now the real fun begins. Assuming your friendly neighborhood monsoon has graced you with lots of great bzots, and you’ve had the camera locked to the same frame, creating the multiple exposure effect is easy. The maelstrom of electricity in the four images below comes from layering 4 or 5 of the other images.
In a nutshell, select two or more lightning shots. For each image, choose ’select all’ and drag them into one image. Each image should be within it’s own layer, and pay close attention to alignment. For each layer, set the blending mode to ‘lighten’, except the background layer. That you’ll want to leave normal. You can, of course, experiment with different blending modes and opacity levels, but lighten @ 100% provides pretty good results.
Lastly, flatten the image and adjust levels as needed. Basically, what you’ve done is the digital equivalent of multiple exposures on one film. Here’s four examples:
