I live in Tampa Bay, Florida, the lightening capital of the world, so I feel obligated to get some lightening shots, and I really want to.I was also surprised there aren't any :F images of lightening that I can find here on the forum.
About a week ago, we had a nice active storm cell that was stationery to my east. I set up the LF (Calumet CC401) with my 90mm, and some Kodak Super-XX in the backyard. I accounted for reciprocity failure, and came up with (I think), and 10 minute exposure time, or thereabouts (metered off the clouds which were relatively light). I did this 3 times. The image below is the only one that had a lightening bolt in it. Meanwhile, during the exposures, I saw quite a few flashes and bolts in the area I was aiming. My backyard exposed pretty well, but the sky is really just an area of lightness.
Take 2. Last night, we had a bunch of active cells moving along the coast (I'm <3 miles from the Gulf of Mexico), so I set up again. This time, before any exposures, I sat there for a few minutes with my spot meter trying to get an exposure reading of 'lightening'. My thinking was that the first try resulted in the clouds being lit up so many times by cloud-to-cloud lightening, that it washed them out. With an exposure for the actual lightening, I hoped I would get a shorter exposure time (turned out to 5 seconds, reciprocity failure moved it to about 60 seconds at f/8. So far I've developed 4 of the 8 shots, and the results are essentially a black image with some brighter outlining of clouds. The negs are still drying, but that's all I can see so far.
So how does one go about capturing lightening? I've done it on digital, but with the reciprocity failure, I'm having difficulty figuring out where to go. Lightening itself is very bright, and really doesn't require the long exposure times, but at the same time, trying to hit the shutter just as a bolt is appearing is pretty close to impossible. Not to mention needing to swap out holder after each try. Or, would you just keep making multiple exposures, hoping that at some point you'll catch a bolt or two?
Here is the 'best' from my first try. Ignore the dust/dirt, as well as the crop (photomerge left a blank area). You can see the bolt in the lower right between the trees.
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