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Getting into the time of year where we get the summer thunderstorms here (had one last night, which inspired this post), and I'm wondering if anyone had any tips for capturing lightning shots. Last night I made it up as I went along (the best results in my gallery), going for as long an exposure time as my camera could manage (16 seconds) with the aperture set to f2.8. Since the areas I was taking photos at were all nice and dark this seemed to work pretty well, no danger of overexposing, and seemed to record the lightning pretty nicely.

I'm happy with how these first attempts of mine came out (despite ending up with 120 photos of not-lightning, 5 'lit up' photos with no arcs visible, and a few with the forks of lightning actually caught in the photo), but would love to know if anyone has other ideas that could work better.

On another note, what's the most common size people re-size their photos to before they upload? I've been leaving them at 2304x1728, but it gets annoying scrolling to see the edges of the photo, and makes it hard to appreciate composition.

Thanks in advance,
Lee

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