Im quite pleased with my effort this evening:

Hard work mind you- i didnt use a tripod (not mobile enough) so i leant against the wall/door/railings (metal railings!! Silly me). I missed many photos, basically miliseconds too early/late and then i over exposed it when i did finally get one!
In the end i found 3 F stops underexposed on a shutter of 1/5th of a second at F8 was ideal and 1/15th of a second when it got dark, This was at a setting of ISO 800.

Got any corkers from tonight and yesterday to show?

Lets see them!

Brilliant pics!

I really like that first pic, and thanks for the settings advice – may try tonight / tomorrow depending on what happens with the weather.

Been using this link that someone posted earlier to track the storms.

http://www.lightningmaps.org/realtime?lang=en

I’ve found that the lightning is happening right where you’re NOT looking!
It also has an annoying habit of also happening just as you sneeze/ look away/ blink etc 😆

Good luck!

(and post the results for us all to see 😉 )

Love that first one.
Very Harry Potter.

The best way is to find an unobstructed view of the sky, use a tripod in a sheltered spot, (under a hatchback door, for example) set to around f8, with a release cable, and play music, using the length of a song as a (very) rough guide for keeping the shutter open.
You build up a series of flashes over time, rather than trying to anticipate each flash.
Of course this is at night, during daylight, you should use ND filters to extend exposure times.
A bit trial-and-error, but at least with digital you get to see the result straight away, and adjust to suit.
I had to use film when I tried it, with days of waiting for a result!
I got one or two, but not great ones, trying to use my phone.
Hardly ideal.
The clouds in that first photo are positively unreal! Very SciFi movie.
Well done, those are really good. 😀

the first one is awesome!

The end is nigh rossi 😯

Nice pics no storms up here yet.

Nice photos – this is one which my timelapse camera captured purely by accident a while back near Mumbai

Cheers, Rich

just found this gif which seems appropriate 🙂

Cheers, Rich

It was not your average UK thunderstorm last night was it?

Felt like I was in a country with proper weather for a bit.

Nice accident Ferret!
I used film the last time we had a descent storm (although that was years, decades even, ago) and yep, when the photos came back there was not a bolt of lightning to be seen except for two photos that were horribly over exposed! Digital is awesome in this respect!
It was a buzz, I feel like I could be a stormchaser- I could do that!!

I was amazed when getting a digital camera that I could actually take photos of the sun – the whole rule-book of photography had been changed 😀

That camera in a box taking a photo every 15 minutes was an old DSLR with the focus locked and everything else completely auto, got 8 months worth of great photos apart from when spiders liked to build webs over the window of the box 🙂

Cheers, Rich

That camera in a box taking a photo every 15 minutes was an old DSLR with the focus locked and everything else completely auto

That sounds great- how did you do this? And was the box specially made or an off the shelf/bodge job?
I wouldn’t mind trying it!

Also i got a lovely shot of the calm before the storm on my mobile:

Captured it lovely 😉

That sounds great- how did you do this? And was the box specially made or an off the shelf/bodge job?
I wouldn’t mind trying it!

You could do it with an old smartphone, like an iPhone 4/4S. There’s an app that lets you take a sequence of still photos at specified intervals, over a period of time, then stitch them together. The phone would obviously need an external power source if it’s going to run over an extended period of time, though.