Neville's Pic of the Day

**Neville Bailey** · 07-Aug-13, 07:41 PM

Umgeni Reflections by Neville A Bailey, on Flickr

**Neville Bailey** · 08-Aug-13, 09:46 PM

Sea Storm by Neville A Bailey, on Flickr

**Dave S** · 09-Aug-13, 06:33 AM

Neville, I've always wanted to know how a photographer gets a lightening shot, I mean the flash of the bolt is only a matter if milliseconds and way too short for someone to still haul out a camera and focus?

**Neville Bailey** · 09-Aug-13, 06:55 AM

Hi Dave,

You are correct - there is no way that anyone has quick enough reflexes to snap a shot of a lightning bolt as it happens, unless you are very lucky!

For these shots, I positioned my camera on a tripod and pointed it in the general direction of the lightning activity. I then set the shutter speed to 10 seconds, the aperture to f/11 and manually focused the camera just before the infinity point. After that I simply pressed the shutter release and hoped that there would be a strike during the 10 second exposure period. I repeated the exercise until I got the shots that I wanted.

Out of a total of about 30 shots, these were the only two that caught a strike! However, I missed a few fantastic strikes while the camera was reading to the memory card in between in each exposure.

**Dave S** · 10-Aug-13, 06:24 AM

I s'pose another way of doing it would be to set up the camera as you mentioned and put it on a timer that takes an exposure every 10 secs or so? A sort of a "time lapse".