What you will need:

• A digital SLR camera with a manual shutter
• A lens with a manual focus
• A tripod
• Spare battery or two
• [Optional] A shutter remote
• A bit of luck

Finally, pick a night where you’ll get good lightning storms, but not severe weather. You don’t want to be focused on a great lightning storm and have extreme winds, large hail, or tornadoes sneak up on you. There’s a reason one of the golden rules of storm chasing is to never chase at night: it’s because you can’t see severe weather hazards coming until it’s too late. The same general rule applies here.

1. Choose a Lens

When choosing a lens, you want something that will give you a balance between zoom level and sky coverage. Wide angle lenses will give you the best sky coverage, but captured lightning often only takes up a very small percentage of the photo. With telephoto lenses, lightning will take up the majority of the frame. Unless you’ve aimed directly where it strikes, you’ll miss the shot. I find my 55-200 millimeter lens gives me ample sky coverage, but still allows the lightning bolt to take up the majority of the shot.

2. Set the Manual Focus of Your Camera Before It Gets Dark

In an ideal world, you could just set the lens’ focus to infinity and the photos would come out nice and clear. Unfortunately, I find that on my lenses, the sweet spot is not quite to infinity, and if I set the focus to infinity, I wind up with blurry pictures. Instead of trying to guess the sweet spot in the pitch dark while wasting precious lightning photos, set the focus before the sun goes down. The camera doesn’t have to aimed at something miles and miles away to get the focus right, just something off in the distance a ways. You do not need to be in the exact location you plan to do your photo shoot. Remember that most lightning strikes you capture on film are only ever a mile or two away at the most.

3. Find an Area with a Clear View of the Sky Towards the Storm

While you do need a clear view of the sky, you can’t just set up anywhere for safety reasons. Do not under any circumstance whatsoever set up anywhere where you may be struck by lightning. This includes areas near or under trees. The electricity from a lightning strike can “jump” from trees to you. In addition, trees (especially sappy trees such as pines and maples) tend to explode when they are struck by lightning, essentially turning the flying chunks of wood into flaming shrapnel. You don’t want to be anywhere near that. If you’ve never seen a tree get struck by lightning, search for it on YouTube. It’s quite spectacular.

So what are good places to set up? The best place to set up is inside a building, but unless you’re in a high rise or in a rural area, finding a building with a clear open view of the sky can be a challenge at the best of times. If you can’t find a spot in a building, get inside of any grounded structure. If all else fails, shooting from inside a vehicle works well, too. One huge advantage of using a vehicle is that you can move around relative to the storm, so you can get more photo opps than you would if you were inside of a building or structure.

When using a vehicle, do everything you can to avoid being in a position where the vehicle can get struck by lightning. While you should be safe inside a vehicle in the event of a lightning strike, lightning will cause serious damage to the vehicle, and you will likely need a tow truck to get you home.

If Possible, Take Lightning Photos From Home

I am fortunate enough that I can set up my tripod right in my kitchen window to do lightning photography. This is a pretty bare-bones setup, but it’s all you need. I use the mountains in the distance to set the manual focus of the camera before the sun sets.

4. Set Up Your Tripod

Aim the lens where the majority of the lightning bolts strike. Re-aim it as the storm moves relative to you. Depending on the size of your lens, you may need to experiment with zoom levels, too. Make sure you have a plan for what to do if it starts raining, as rain and expensive cameras do not mix. If you’ve chosen your location properly, you shouldn’t have to worry about this, but it’s always good to have a plan in place.

5. Using the Manual Shutter Setting, Use Long Exposures, and Let the Picture Take Itself

There is one, and only one reason that we do lightning photography at night: the human reflex is not fast enough to take pictures of lightning during the day. Any pictures taken during the day were either pure luck or used a lightning detector.

The photo below is the only lightning photo I’ve ever taken during the day, and it was completely by accident. I shot this photo out the window of a van with an iPhone on my way from the Grand Canyon back to Williams, Arizona in July, 2015. I was only trying to get a picture of the storm, and the timing of the lightning bolt just happened to align itself perfectly with me pressing the button to take the picture.

For camera settings, I recommend the following:

• Manual shutter mode (or pure manual mode if you know what you’re doing)
• Manual focus, which you should have set earlier.
• Shutter speeds of 1 to 8 seconds, depending on how much ambient light is present
  • Having a spare battery or two is highly recommended, as long shutter speeds burn through batteries an an unbelievable rate.
  • Take a few “test” pictures before you start to get an idea of how ambient light affects exposure levels at different shutter speeds.
• Shoot in RAW format which allows for recovering washed out photos and better touching up
  • If you shoot in JPEG mode and have a washed out picture, you will not be able to recover it. With RAW format, you can.

Keep the Shutter Open as Much as Possible

Once you have your ideal shutter speed in place, you want the shutter to be open as much as possible, so as soon as the shutter closes on one picture, open it right back up so the next picture can begin. It’s incredibly frustrating when you get an amazing lightning strike and the shutter is closed for any reason. It happens way more often than you’d think.

Finally, be prepared for a lot of dark photos of nothing. My most successful lightning shoot this summer yielded 22 useable photos out of about 300 pictures shot that night – a success rate of about 7%. If you keep 10% of your photos, you are well ahead of the game. Even a 5% keep rate I consider very successful.

6. Touch Up The Photos With a Computer Program

I take great pride in the fact that my photos are for the most part undoctored, and when I do doctor them, I make it very obvious that they are doctored. The same is true for my lightning pictures.

When you first pull the photos off the camera, the lightning will generally look almost black and white. Most of the lightning photos you see online are a beautiful electric blue or purple color. So what gives? It turns out, some very minor, and very simple touching up of the saturation and/or vibrancy is enough to get the job done.

The full touch up process will go something like this. Keep in mind these should all be tweaks and minor adjustments, not huge changes, but you are ultimately the judge of what looks best in your photos.

1. Make any necessary adjustments to the exposure, including darkening highlights (if necessary). Some pictures need it, and some don’t.
2. Add a little definition to sharpen the edges of the lightning bolts.
3. Turn up the saturation and/or vibrancy. Some professional photo editors allow you to adjust the saturation and vibrancy of individual colors.

You want to be shooting for a final lightning photo that looks something like this:

7. Show Off Your Pictures to Friends and Family

If you followed all of the previous steps, you should get plenty of ooh’s and aah’s from your lightning photography. I’ll leave you with some more examples of lightning photography I’ve taken both this summer and in years past.

The post 7 Steps to the Perfect Lightning Photo appeared first on Matthew Gove Blog.

Did you know that you can take that measurement a few steps further and relate the duration of the thunder roll to the length of the lightning channel? It’s the same idea as determining how far away the lightning strike was, but the physics are slightly more involved.

A Very Simple Example

Consider a very simple model of a cloud-to-ground (CG) lightning strike 2 km away. The lightning channel comes straight down out of the cloud and the ground is flat (I apologize for my lousy art skills that make it look otherwise). The cloud base is 2 km above the ground.

We can use speed equals distance over time to uncover plenty of information about the thunder. Since we have a right triangle, we can use the Pythagorean Theorem to determing that you are 2.8 km from where the lightning channel comes out of the bottom of the cloud.

You will hear the top of the strike at:

The duration of the thunder roll is simply the time difference between when the top and the bottom of the strike reach your ear.

Since we can measure the duration of the thunder much easier than we can measure the length of the lightning channel, we can work backwards to determine the length of the lightning channel and how far away the strike is. Note that in the real world, the lightning channel is never straight, so these calculations will be for minimum values.

A Simple Real-World Example

Assume a straight-line propagation of the sound wave from thunder at a speed of 340 m/s (the speed of sound). In other words, the sound wave comes straight from the lightning to your ear and does not go up hills, around corners, or anything like that. An observer hears thunder 10 seconds after seeing a lightning flash, and the thunder lasts for 8 seconds.

How far is the observer from the closest point on the lightning channel?

The sound from the closest point on the lightning channel reaches your ear first, which occurs 10 seconds after you see the lightning flash.

What is the minimum length of the flash?

The minimum length of the channel would be if the channel were a straight line. In the real world, lightning channels are never straight lines, but can get pretty close. At least close enough to validate this approximation.

Under what circumstances would the length calculated in the previous part be the actual length of the lightning channel?

For the minimum length to be the actual length of the lightning channel, you want the sound from each end of the lightning channel to travel the same path to your ear. Remember that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. The explanation is quite complicated and involves much more complicated math, which I don’t want to get into and I’m sure you don’t want to hear about, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.

Anyway, if the sound from each end of the lightning channel travels the same path to your ear, you are perfectly in line with the channel. If you take a piece of pipe and look through it like a telescope, that is what being perfectly in line with the pipe is. The light coming into the end of the pipe travels to your eye in the same path as the light inside the pipe. Otherwise you’d be seeing all sorts of different images. Unfortunately, if you’re dealing with a cloud-to-ground strike, being perfectly in line with the lightning channel means that you are being struck by it, so I really wouldn’t recommend trying to experience that.

So that’s a few cool new tricks you can do with the next thunderstorm you see. At worst, it’ll explain why the long rolls of thunder come from cloud-to-cloud strikes (which can reach lengths greater than 20 km), but hopefully it’ll help you understand a little bit more of what’s going on inside that thunderhead.

The post 2 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Lightning (and 1 You Probably Did) appeared first on Matthew Gove Blog.

Just after 3 PM, storms began to explode on the dryline in the far eastern Texas Panhandle. I set off from Norman headed west on Highway 9 to see what I could see. An area of interest quickly became apparent, as a supercell near Childress, Texas went Tornado Warned. Numerous storms were headed into southwestern Oklahoma so I dropped south on Highway 58 out of Carnegie, OK. Unfortunately these storms did not offer much in the way of good photo opps. The cluster of storms looked just like a cloudy day from where I was.

I needed a more isolated cell to get the type of shots I was looking for. Luckily, there was an isolated storm between Elk City and Clinton moving slowly east across Interstate 40. I headed north out of Apache, OK and through Anadarko on US-281. Once I got north of Anadarko, it became clear that this would likely be the storm that would give me the best photo opps.

One problem in that part of the state can be the terrain. There are lots of hills, trees, and small canyons. If there was somewhere to pull over that had a clear view, I had to take advantage of it. There was one decent spot on US-281, but not much as I headed east on Highway 152 to stay ahead of the storm. A Severe Thunderstorm Warning was issued for the storm so now I really wanted to find a place to stop to take pictures of it.

I headed south on US-81 with very few opportunities to pull over. I found the next eastbound paved road to get over to Highway 92, which brought me to the town of Amber. I dropped south out of Amber, looking for a spot to pull over. There were none, so I turned around and headed back north and into the storm’s path. I drove back and forth a bunch of times before I finally found a spot to pull over in the entrance to a grain mill. The storm was just beautiful, and I’ll be the first to admit I got a little mesmerized by it. I got out the camera and started shooting.

It turns out that I had been so focused on trying to find a place to stop I hadn’t been paying attention to what was going on around me and my escape route was unknowingly closing. After sitting and watching this storm for the better part of 10 minutes, I had another look at the radar. My escape route to get home was to take 92 back down to Highway 9 just east of Chickasha. The new radar showed a new storm had formed and was basically on top of Chickasha at that moment. I had to make a run at getting back to Highway 9 before the storm got there. On these types of days, you have to assume that any storm that develops will grow and become severe.

This storm was not severe and was not producing tornadoes or large hail, but it was a big time lightning maker. There is no more unnerving feeling than driving across the open Oklahoma prairie with no trees around and lightning strikes coming down all around you. I made it down to Highway 9 amidst some spitting rain, turned east, and put the hammer down. I quickly punched out from under the storm and avoided any lightning strikes. The severe storm I was just on had taken a right hand turn and was headed straight for Norman, but it fell apart well before it got there.

Later that night, a Mesoscale Convective System (or MCS) had developed in southern Kansas and was racing south into Oklahoma. MCS’s often produce widespread damaging wind. This MCS was likely the reason the SPC had put out a moderate risk for much of Oklahoma. The gust front of this MCS was about 10 miles out in front of the thunderstorms, and rolled into the Oklahoma City metro just before midnight. There were 70-plus mph winds reported just west of Norman with the gust front, but it was pretty anticlimactic coming through Norman, with wind gusts not even getting to 40 mph. Regardless, though, these four straight days of chasing were one heck of a finale to the month of May.

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The SPC had been forecasting the big outbreak on Saturday April 14th since the previous weekend, and had already gone High Risk by the morning Day 2 Outlook on Friday, which was the earliest it had ever issued a High Risk and was just the second time in its history that it issued a Day 2 High Risk. Since all forecasts pointed to the highest risk for severe weather to be in the late evening and overnight and I wanted to avoid the chase crowds, I opted to make my main chase day Friday, especially since the elevated tornado risk was very close to home and the chaser crowds would be much less.

A cluster of supercells formed in southwest Oklahoma early in the afternoon and began tracking northeast along Interstate 44. One cell in particular caught my eye, which was located to the southwest of Chickasha, which I was tracking on radar from my house. The projected storm track showed it going up into southwest Oklahoma City, so I grabbed my things and set off to chase it.

The initial chase plan was to head to Blanchard and document it from Highway 9 as it passed to the north and west. I didn’t even make it close to there. In the time it took me to drive from my house out to I-35 (less than 10 minutes), the storm had developed a vigorous mesocyclone on its southeast flank and was beginning to turn right, so I quickly adjusted my plan and set up to the north of Goldsby.

One of the interesting things about the dynamics of these big supercells is that as a mesocyclone develops, the storm’s rotation pulls the whole storm to the right. In general, the stronger the rotation, the more the storm pulls to the right. You will often hear chasers and meteorologists call this type of storm a “Right-Mover.” You can also have left-movers, but they usually occur when a supercell splits, like I saw on April 9th up in Woodward.

The mesocyclone on this supercell developed and strengthened so quickly, that it turned the storm pretty significantly to the east and pointed it straight at downtown Norman. I could see the storm turn to the right both from my location north of Goldsby and on radar, so it was time to reposition to the east. The only way across the Canadian River is on I-35, so I raced back north on I-35 to go east on Highway 9 and reposition on the east side of Norman. With a brand new windshield, I wanted absolutely no part of any hail core that was associated with the storm.

As I got off of I-35 and started heading east on Highway 9, you could see the beginnings of a tornado vortex signature start to form on radar. The storm was a huge HP (high-precipitation) mess, so all I could see to the west was absolutely black skies and a white wall of rain, coming straight at me.

By the time I had gotten over to the southeast side of Norman, it was becoming clearer and clearer that a tornado may be imminent. Realizing that this was an HP mess (so no good photo ops) and there were no really good options to the south as far as escape routes go (and I was only about 5 minutes from home), the best decision was to head for home to take shelter.

I pulled into the driveway and quickly began unloading my cameras and things out of the truck. As I was locking the truck up, the tornado sirens began blaring, so I went inside and turned the TV on to see what was going on. They said a tornado had been confirmed on the ground near the OU campus. It took me a couple seconds to put it all together, but this tornado was headed straight for the house. Time to gather a couple things and head for the safe room.

I had actually spent the morning prepping and stocking the safe room in anticipation of the High Risk day on Saturday, and boy was I glad I did so. It was a pretty tense several minutes sitting in the safe room listening to the wind and rain pound the house as the tornado passed. The main circulation/vortex passed between half a mile and a mile from the house, so I was probably in the outer fringes of the circulation. As soon as the main circulation was to my east, I grabbed the camera and headed back outside and did manage to get some nice shots of the back of the mesocyclone as it moved away. The storm continued to produce tornadoes as it moved northeast, and had a multi-vortex tornado on the ground as it crossed Interstate 40 near Shawnee. And this was only the beginning of the outbreak.

I once again decided to target the area close to home on Saturday (since I wanted to avoid the chaser crowds and be close to home in case anything happened. I focused mainly on the extreme southern part of the High Risk area and the part of the Moderate Risk area to the southwest of that.

As the day went on, models and forecasts showed tornadic supercells exploding in West-Central Oklahoma around dinnertime, so that became my primary target. It was amazing watching the tornado outbreak unfold over Kansas and northern Oklahoma on TV throughout the day.

As the dinnertime hours rolled around, severe weather and tornado parameters were maxed out across much of northwestern Oklahoma and were still extremely high over West-Central Oklahoma, but the area had remained under cloud cover nearly all day, significantly reducing surface heating and allowing what little bit of a cap that was there to still hold. With no boundary around either, there was simply no way to initiate the upward motion required to form thunderstorms. The focus then shifted to a dangerous and explosive squall line that was supposed to come ripping across Oklahoma overnight.

In the meantime, I tracked a very powerful, long-track tornadic supercell that came out of the Texas panhandle and began producing tornadoes near Waynoka, OK right at sunset. The shots from the news helicopters of the tornadoes forming are just breathtaking (see photos). The storm produced strong tornadoes for over two hours, prompting a Tornado Emergency in Wichita, Kansas shortly before 10 PM.

After a short lull in the action after the tornado passed just south and east of Wichita, the explosive squall line very quickly formed in the Texas panhandle around 10:30 PM as the cold front overtook the dryline and nearly instantly became severe and came plowing into western Oklahoma during the 11:00 hour.

When the squall line came ripping into western Oklahoma, the tornado parameters were absolutely maxed out (quite a bit more than they were on May 24th last year), particularly north of I-40. There was so much spin and wind shear in the atmosphere it would cause the squall line to wiggle. If a cell was able to break out in front it would instantly become supercellular and tornadic. Unfortunately one cell was able to do that at about 12:15 AM, which struck the northwest side of Woodward with a deadly tornado with less than 3 minutes of warning.

My original plan was to get a couple hours of sleep while this line tracked across western Oklahoma, but after watching the disaster unfold in Woodward, I decided that was probably not the wisest thing to do. A PDS (Particularly Dangerous Situation) Tornado Watch was still in effect for pretty much the entire northwest quadrant of Oklahoma, and tornado parameters were still extremely high right through the I-35 corridor and the Oklahoma City metro.

The squall line was at its peak strength between about 12:30 AM and 2:30 AM. At one point the squall line was over 800 miles long (no that’s not a type-o), stretching from north of Topeka, Kansas all the way down to just north of the Mexican border in southwest Texas. A good portion of the line had Severe Thunderstorm Warnings on it.

Between 2:30 and 3:00 AM, the very potent squall line was beginning to encroach on the Oklahoma City metro, with the Tornado Watch extended to include the metro. There was still so much spin in the atmosphere that even the small updrafts had pretty good rotation in them. You could see the cells on radar really trying to break out ahead of the line, but this time it was south of I-40, which really peaked my interest, since strong tornadoes could still easily form in any cell that could break out ahead of the line. Fortunately, as we closed in on 3:00 AM, the line was able to hold together strong.

I don’t know whether to call it luck or irony or what, but the feature that really helped Central Oklahoma was actually the same feature that caused this massive tornado outbreak: the potent low pressure system coming out of the southwest. As system came roaring out of the southwest, it accelerated the westerly winds behind the cold front, which ended up being strong enough to undercut the squall line with cold air, choking off its fuel supply and both significantly weakening the whole line and eliminating any remaining tornado threat. By 3:45 AM, as the line was beginning to come into the western Oklahoma City metro, it had been undercut so much it had come back down below severe parameters and was weakening, so there were no warnings as it came into the metro.

The line came through Norman around 4:15 AM, giving us a pretty good lightning display and some gusty winds and heavy rain, but that was about it. Cool stable air settled in behind the front, closing the book on another memorable Great Plains Tornado Outbreak. It has been one heck of a start to storm season here in Tornado Alley. Quiet weather over the southern plains the next week will be a nice little break, but I’m already looking forward to the next chase.

The post Central Plains Tornado Outbreak appeared first on Matthew Gove Blog.

I pulled into Woodward a few minutes after 3:00 and stopped at a truck stop to have one last look at the models. I headed to the east side of town to be in the best position to go east and south to stay ahead of the southeast-moving storms. I waited for less than 10 minutes before the first storm initated just north of Woodward, up near Buffalo. I blasted north on Highway 34 to get into position.

I found a perfect spot to pull over just southeast of the base of a beautiful developing supercell that was slowly moving northeast and had a front row seat to watch the storm mature. I was also watching another rapidly-strengthening storm further to the southwest as well. The cell I was on started to show weak rotation on radar, but couldn’t get its act together much beyond that. I could see a wall cloud trying to form, but it became clear pretty quickly that this storm wasn’t going to produce a tornado right then. The storm then turned southeast and headed straight for me so I turned around and high-tailed it back to Woodward to stay ahead of the rain and hail core of both storms.

I tracked back and forth a couple times between Woodward and Mooreland trying to figure out where the best position would be. Finally it became clear that I needed to get back to the south side of Woodward. Coming back west on US-412 I could see a rotating wall cloud start to put down a tornado right in front of me. It was not very well organized, but did get very close to the ground and was actually scraping the ground on several occasions, but could never fully touch down. It dissipated less than two minutes after forming.

As I came into Woodward, the rotating wall cloud was reorganizing quickly. As I watched the surface air being entrained into the rotating updraft I knew a funnel was imminent. Being the first possible tornado of the year, I quickly became mesmerized by this developing twister and fell into a deep state of tunnel vision, putting myself into perfect position to document the tornado for a northeast-moving storm. Unfortunately, the storm was moving southeast, with the primary hail core headed straight for me.

A light drizzle was falling as I headed through downtown Woodward. As I was waiting at the light to turn south on Highway 34 a hailstone that was easily the size of a baseball fell on the road right in front of me. Then that gut-wrenching felling of “Oh this is gonna be really bad” hit me. In an instant it went from a light drizzle to softballs falling out of the sky. I knew right then and there I would not be coming out of that unscathed. It was like a bad dream watching these softball sized hailstones continue to get bigger. Then the first one hit the bottom of the windshield, putting a large crack across the bottom and snapping me right back into reality.

So I was faced with an interesting dilemma: Huge hail was falling which could easily knock you out cold if you took one off the head and my windshield was beginning to go. Do I try to look for cover, or do I make a run for it? I desperately searched around for a tree, a sign, anything to hide under, but came up empty. That’s right when the hailstone that was easily softball sized hit the bottom corner of the windshield, spiderwebbing the entire driver’s side instantly (the main impact on the windshield was 4.5 inches in diameter and I had dents on the roof bigger than 5 inches in diameter). I didn’t have a choice then. I had to make a run for it, and headed south on Highway 34 as fast as I could.

Driving through baseball and softball sized hail knowing that probably one more direct hit would most likely take out the windshield has to be one of the most unnerving feelings in the world. I was quite amazed at how quickly I punched out of the main hail core and drove out of it as quickly as I had driven into it. The storm quickly went Tornado Warned right after I punched out of the core. I could look over my shoulder and see the tornado on the ground, but it was quite painful knowing that I couldn’t stop to shoot it since the hail core was chasing me down Highway 34. The tornado quickly became rain-wrapped and was on the ground less than a minute, so it would have been gone by the time I stopped anyway.

As I ran south on Highway 34 with the hail core in hot pursuit, lightning started striking all around. My first thought was “Great, I outran the hail, now I’m gonna get struck by lightning.” Keep in mind that this is the wide open Oklahoma prairie and there are no trees or tall objects around anywhere whatsoever. I’m not sure if it was luck or what, but when the lightning did strike right next to me, there was one single tree on the other side of the highway that it struck instead of me. Living in Florida for 6 years did desensitize me from very close lightning strikes, but it was still a pretty good adrenaline rush. It seemed like an eternity, but eventually the lightning stopped coming down and the skies started to get a bit brighter.

I drove all the way to Watonga before I finally stopped to assess the damage. Thankfully, the windshield took the brunt of the damage. The hail knocked my fuel door open, knocked my rear view mirror off the window, knocked my satellite radio antenna off the roof, and left some nice looking dents on the car. It also left a fairly large tree limb in the bed of the truck too. It was a very memorable way to net the first tornado of the year, and the adrenaline rush didn’t wear off until the next day. My windshield is all fixed now and everthing’s all set to resume chasing at the end of the week.

The post Tornadoes, Huge Hail, and Lightning, Oh My! appeared first on Matthew Gove Blog.

Even when using an easier technique, the success rate is still very small. I’ll usually shoot around 100 photos on a typical lightning shoot, and on a good day will wind up with only 5 or so shots worth keeping. The silver lining, however, is that when you do finally have success, the results will be stunning.

So just how do you do it? You need several things:

1. An SLR camera where you can control the shutter speed
2. A tripod
3. A clear, unobstructed view of the sky
4. Dark Outside/Night Time
5. Minimal Ambient Light

When choosing a location, you must keep safety in mind. Do not try to set up in the middle of an open field in the middle of nowhere – you are asking to be struck by lightning. The best spots to shoot are near buildings, or in/near your car. I would avoid setting up near or under trees, since they explode when struck by lightning. I have been fortunate enough to do most of my lightning photography from the comfort of my own home (a backyard/porch is an excellent place to shoot lightning).

Once you have chosen your location, it’s time to set up the camera. First you will want to set the shutter speed to Manual, which is called “Bulb Mode” on most SLR cameras. This mode gives you the most control over the shutter, but you can also set the shutter speed to a specific time if you want (I actually often do this, mainly just because I often have ambient lighting to deal with). I usually leave the shutter open between 5 and 20 seconds, and will go as high as 30 seconds if there is very little ambient light. You also have to set the focus to “Infinity.” If you don’t know how to do that, you will need to consult your camera’s user guide. The picture here is of my camera setup that I use to shoot lightning…nice and simple.

Now you are ready for the fun part: taking the pictures. The concept is pretty simple: point the camera at the sky, open the shutter, and let the picture take itself. The actual lightning flash itself will provide all of the light you need for a great photograph. A wide-angle lens will give you much more coverage of the sky, but will result in degraded resolution of any lightning you get. I usually use either my 55-200 mm lens or my 70-300 mm lens, zoomed all the way out.

There are a few framing tips to make a great lightning shot. You will want the ground at the very bottom of the frame, and if you can get a few small trees or shrubs in the foreground or a tree line in a background, it will add some depth to the photo. Any object you put in the frame will just show up as a silhouette, but you want them to be small enough they don’t dominate the frame. If you are in a mountainous area, the relief of the mountain range will usually give the same effect.

Look at the two pictures on the first page. The photo on the left was taken looking out over the Gulf of Mexico, and the one on the right was taken with some silhouetted trees in the foreground. Notice how the field and the tree line give the shot a lot more depth than the flat water.

As far as positioning relative to the storm goes, you want to be in a place where it’s not raining. I have had the most success out in front of the leading edge of the storm, but have captured good lightning shots on the backside of the storm as well. The only thing to keep in mind is that if you are out in front of the storm you will need to be near a place where you can quickly and easily take shelter from the rain and lightning. You are almost guaranteed to get rained on and will often get lightning strikes fairly close by, unless you can stay well out in front of the storm. Unlike chasing and documenting tornadoes, you will usually find yourself much more up close and personal with the storm while trying to shoot lightning, especially if you are shooting from a building.

Finally, keep the camera aimed at the spot where you see the most lightning. It does take a bit of luck to get a lightning bolt in the viewfinder while the shutter is open, so you will want to maximize the time the shutter is open (after you close the shutter, open it right back up!). Keeping the shutter open for long periods of time drains the battery very quickly, so make sure you have an extra battery handy. Don’t bump or jar the camera either, or your pictures will come out blurry. If you have a remote, use that to open and close the shutter.

Please keep safety in mind while you are out shooting lightning!! Lightning is one of the most deadly weather phenomena out there. You will be out shooting at night, which can be very dangerous for storm chasing/spotting, especially if conditions support severe storms. You will not be able to see tornadoes and large hail coming! Always have a way to get real-time weather updates, statements, warnings, etc. If you don’t feel comfortable out chasing lightning after dark, don’t do it. Shoot from a building instead. That’s what I usually try to do. Good luck in your lightning photography endeavors, and don’t hesitate to post questions to my Facebook or Twitter pages if you have any.

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The storm formed over Hillsborough County and moved west/northwest. When it emerged over the waters of Tampa Bay and collided with the afternoon sea breeze, it just exploded, growing into a monster severe thunderstorm by about 6:30 PM. A Severe Thunderstorm Warning was issued for Pinellas County shortly thereafter. The storm came ashore in St. Petersburg with full force around 6:40. At the house, winds gusted in the 45-55 mph range and rain came down so hard you could barely see.

Between 6:30 and 6:45, nearly 1,100 lightning strikes hit the Tampa Bay area, or an average of 1.2 strikes per second. The highest recorded wind gust was 70 mph at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. Back at the house, the lightning show was starting. The first close lightning strike hit about 200 feet from me (it’s in the video), and then numerous lightning strikes hit within 1/4 mile over the next 20 minutes. Before I knew it, the worst of the storm had passed, but the lightning and thunder continued until after 9:00.

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ZEPHYRHILLS, FL — I was originally targeting an area to the south on Thursday, down in the heart of Sarasota County. That area saw some great storms in the morning, but by afternoon the storms were ripe for pickin’ along the Interstate 4 corridor in Lightning Alley.

At about 2:30 PM, I looked at the radar, and found most of I-4 between Tampa and Orlando was under various Severe Thunderstorm Warnings. I set my eyes on one of those severe-warned cells was in the Brandon area, tracking north/northeast towards the interstate. By the time I got onto I-4, the storm had fallen apart, and the warning had been cancelled. Just as I was feeling the agony of defeat, the radio buzzed, and a new Severe Thunderstorm Warning was issued on a huge cell just to the north. The storm had a well-defined mesocyclone on it, and the northern part of it was dropping pea-to-quarter-sized hail in Hernando County.

I got off of I-4 at Exit 10 and headed north on Mango Rd, where I picked up US-301. Travelling north on 301, I was able to track along right on the Southeastern flank of the impressive storm, but huge trees on the side of the road prevented me from taking any good pictures. The storm was drifting slowly to the northeast, and without any eastbound roads, I soon found myself swallowed up in the edge of the rain core. Once inside the rain core, there were some very impressive lightning strikes pretty close to me, with one striking a radio tower less than a quarter-mile away.

I came into the town of Zephyrhills at the same time as the leading edge of the storm’s core. It was raining so hard you could hardly see, winds gusted in the 40-50 mph range, and several small hailstones fell around the car. I knew I was going to have to punch the core to get back to I-75, so I turned west onto SR-54 and went for it. I did have to battle heavy wind and rain (and saw some pretty flooded yards), but all in all, it was an uneventful and successful core punch.

This storm was so cool because I was able to come up from and pass behind it before tracking NNE along the edge of it and eventually got in front of it. Zephyrhills wound up getting over 4 inches of rain, and I got a couple good photos to take home with me.

Part 2

PASS-A-GRILLE BEACH, FL — As the sun was setting, I noticed that there were some ominous dark clouds to the west. After seeing a few faint flashes in the sky, I grabbed the camera and headed out to the beach. A line of thunderstorms was about 20 miles offshore and headed straight for us. I stood on the beach and took pictures of the storm from about 9:00-9:40 PM and got some great lightning pictures. The setup for lightning pictures could not have been any more textbook. The timing worked out great, too, as my camera ran out of batteries just as it started to rain.

Part 3

ST. PETERSBURG, FL — I ended up not having to leave the house for my final intercept of the night. I awoke around 12:30 AM to the sounds of pine cones hitting the roof. I opened the slider door in the bedroom only to be greeted by 35-45 mph wind gusts, heavy rain, and more lightning. A Special Weather Statement had been posted as strong thunderstorms were pushing through the area. Some of the wind gusts and lightning strikes were impressive (I tried to capture some of it on video), but it didn’t quite live up to the powerful microburst that tore through south St. Pete on April 26th.

We awoke this morning to a threat of tornadoes, but nothing ever came out of it. It was a terrific start to June, and hopefully there will be plenty more of these to come.

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Looking at the weather models, I decided to target the area between Redington Shores and Indian Rocks Beach. Everything appeared to be in place for an intercept there just before sunset, so I hit the road at about 4:30 to make sure I got up there in time. Unfortunately, while I was driving up, the front stalled just the slightest amount, so I was at Indian Shores well before the front got there. I continued north to see if I could pull off an intercept at Clearwater Beach. Sadly, there was no severe weather near Clearwater, only rain.

Later in the evening, Pinellas County was put under a tornado watch, and south Pinellas went under a Severe Thunderstorm Warning between 8 and 9. After I left Beef O’Brady’s, I headed for Pass-a-Grille to re-attempt the intercept.

I set up on the beach near 15th Ave and captured some great pictures of the lightning coming ashore, the first time I successfully captured lightning with the still camera. The intercept was a complete success, and I was able to escape before the rain came. It turns out that the cell that was severe warned hit the Redington Shores/Indian Shores area, but I was happy with the shots I got from Pass-a-Grille.

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