How to photograph lightning

Photos of lightning rank among the most spectacular of any type of photo. This is the result of two factors working together in a photograph that are specific to the medium of photography:

• The ability to arrest time (here still photos have the advantage over movies),


• The ability to condense time onto a single image (so that multiple lightning strikes become overlayed into a single megaburst in the print)

Here's an example that I shot from our of my window a couple of years ago. Feel free to click through to my flickr page to see it large (it looks way better that size anyway.)

Bearing this in mind, lets have a quick look at how to set up and shoot lightning without becoming a statistic. Just remember that lightning is VERY dangerous, and the rain that usually accompanies lightning does no good to you camera. For this reason I tend to do my lightning shoots indoors, usually from my apartment window. I don't like to go wandering round hillsides and fields, just asking for a quick zap as I hold onto the steel of my tripod and put it into puddles of water.

In terms of camera settings, you need to use manual settings on you camera for this, and you definitely need to use a long exposure. It's hard to guess the exact moment when lightning will strike, so what I usually do is set my camera on bulb or between 20 and 30 second exposure times (tripod essential), and shoot while hoping that the strike will hit during that time. This can be frustrating, and requires patience, but here again the advantage of being safely indoors makes itself clear. Rather than freezing in the rain on some blasted heath, I prefer to be warm, dry and having a coffee or a whiskey. You will find that lightning tends to strike between frames, no matter how short you keep your time between button presses.

For the F-stops, the key is to maximize your depth of field: it sucks to get a perfectly exposed, perfectly timed shot of lightning that has a great foreground and blurry lightning. So, minimize the bokeh, and shoot between f16 and whatever the minimum on your lens is.

I also usually shoot my lightning at night: I'm at home more (the day job does tend to get in the way of these kinds of experiments) and I can also be more sure that a long exposure won't overexpose my shot. I still go for quite a low ISO rating, especially on my older Nikon D50, which tends to be very noisy.

Compositionally, I try to put some other things in the frame. A photo of black sky and a streak of lightning doesn't look great, but a shot of a hillside or a house or some other feature gives balance, interest and scale to the shot.

And that's how I shoot lightning. Feel free to check out the incredible lightning shots in the Flickr Top Twenty Lighning Shots pool, or look at National Geographic for more great photos. And you can always read the National Geographic Field guide to Landscape Photography for more on how to shoot this incredible natural phenomenon.

Hong Kong Cityscapes

New York - or Liberty City, as it's currently known :) - may be the city that never sleeps, but Hong Kong has a fair claim to being a late-night town as well. Most of the shops here close at 10:00pm, and you're only getting ready to go out at 11:00 pm.

Hong Kong has a lot to offer in terms of cityscapes, and a view across Victoria Harbour on a sunny summer day is quite something- but the city leaves it's best take-my-breath-away beautiful for that time between sunset and sunrise, when the lights are on. And it really can take you breath away: a trip down to Tsim Sha Tsui always impresses, no matter how often I've been there over the course of the last three years.

Here's what I mean:



This is a shot I got a couple of weeks ago, and which I've been meaning to go and get for ages. It's taken during the Symphony of Light, which is a tourist-board initiative over which uses a host of buildings on both sides of the harbour as a giant light-and-sound production. It' s really something to see, as huge lasers flick out into the night sky, and whole buildings flash and pop their lights. Less something to hear, though, as the soundtrack is willfully appaling. BUt hey, you can't have it all.

Unfortunately, I took my travel-light tripod along with me on this shoot, rather than the big boy, as I was confident I could use some concrete blocks to lift the camera over the railings in the parkinglot I was using as a shooting location. I use this parking lot all the time, and was sure that the blocks would be perfect. Turns out I was wrong: using the blocks would have been downright dangerous, as they would leave me balancing my camera very pecariously 8 stories over a very busy walkway. Dropping objects from height in Hong Kong even by accident, is a criminal offence, to say nothing of the damage to my camera.

So I was forced to keep the camera on it's neck strap, hand-hold, balance and hope. I put the zoom all the way in, to 28mm, and pointed in roughly the right direction. Then, I took a deep breath, pushed the shutter-release, and waited the 30 seconds I was looking for. After two shots, I realised that I wouldn't be able to hold my breath for long enough. CO2 was filling up my lungs, making them feel like a balloon which was about to burst, and I started shaking.

So I then moved on to a series of slow, steady breaths out while taking the shots. I was balancing the camera on those offending concrete blocks, which was ok for just the camera (safely wrapped up on my neckstrap and resting on my pointer and middle finger for an approximation of the correct angle for the photo). I got two frames that kind of worked - they're nice and sharp, but I have had to crop them down from a 6 MP shot to about a 4 MP - which is less than ideal.

I also failed to check my settings before shooting, and shot JPEG, which hamstrings you a little when you get home and fire up photoshop. So I'm planning on a reshoot of the day, with the big daddy tripod and full zoom available to me.

Here's the other decent pic from the night's shooting:



which I think worked out really well. A little work on levels, a little sharpening and some removal of unwanted lens flare, and it brightened up well.

Shooting landscapes (or cityscapes, really) in Hong Kong is one of the best things to do while you're here, and because of it's nighttime photogenic properties, you'll generally be out there sometime lateish. This is what I've found to be my favourite locations, gear and settings (in no particular order):

• 20 - 30 seconds, at ISO 200. I like to go with the lowest ISO rating I can- saves time on the noise, which I really detest about digital photography. Give me good old film grain any day, especially for black and white.
• Water, somewhere, and often in the foreground. Reflected light gives some awesome colour effects here, and there are usually a lot of lights to reflect from. See the above two pics for what I mean, as well as this one:

• Weird colours in the sky, and on the water, because of these reflections. These usually work for you, but the sky colour can often come out very bright at long exposures because of all the flight around. It can give you a nice fringed effect from the other side of a hill, or it can go luminous orange, which may or may not work out well. IN the shot above, the sea goes a nice colour, but the sky is all weird.
• Tripod with stabilizing hook for you to put your camera bag on to hold the tripod steady. Hong Kong doesn't often have heavy winds (outside of a typhoon) but it does have a lot of poeple walking by your gear, which can cause a slight shake in your shots.
• Shutter release cord or IR shutter release - it often happens that you bump your camera while you set off the shutter. Before I got the IR release for Nikon, I used the time release, which works fine for camera shake, but you can't time your shot to perfection.

So, Tsing Lung Tau, Victoria peak and TST beckon again, and I'll be shooting all at night again. Anyone else got any tips to add to this, or other night shot locations? I went up Tai Mo Shan a couple of weekends back, well before dawn, to get a sunrise over the city shot, but it turned out to be a complete bust: very hazy, and I couldn't see through some thick summer foliage. How about Jardine's Lookout, Kowloon side? I've never been up there. Any good?