A few weeks ago, I had the fun fortune of being on the ninth floor or a hotel in Orlando, Florida when a thunder storm happened to pass through the city. I have always enjoyed attempting to capture lightning and this happened to be the perfect set of circumstances for such a feat. I grabbed my camera and went out onto the balcony, then waited patiently for my camera to adjust to the humidity! I quickly made my adjustments for a long exposure and steadied my camera as best as I could without the aid of a tripod, using a chair that was supplied on the balcony.

I then took countless photos, each several seconds of exposures to capture what you see here. It is a very fun and exciting thing to do when you have an opportunity that provides proper shelter, lightning, and of course your camera handy. However, it also takes a lot of patience to actually get what you want. I always end up telling myself, just one more…just five more. All in hopes that the next photo will be the most amazing one yet. Nevertheless, you can’t control nature. The one great strike might come down while your camera is processing information in between photos and you may not even catch it, but that is part of the excitement. As it turns out, I was able to get a few that I was happy with and had a great time.

If you are a photographer and have never tried, this is a perfect season to give it a go.

Camera settings:
Aperture priority and manual focus to keep the camera from fidgeting the entire time…
ISO 800
22mm
f/25
Photo 1) 20 seconds
Photo 2) 0.6 seconds
Photo 3) 10 seconds
Photo 4) 10 seconds

Settings are a constant experiment depending on the landscape and the amount of lightning that is currently coming down. This is just something to play with and again have fun seeing what works for your shot.