Lightning with Canon A710

[magnus1225]

Hello all, as you can see the title pretty much says it all. I'd like to get some shots of lightning, but i have a Canon A710. A point and shoot camera if i'm correct. I've looked at quite a few lightning pics on this forum and they all use bigger nice camera's. So i dont even know if the 710 is cut out for getting some nice lightning shots. Anywho, what would i have to do for the settings? Have like a 20 sec exposure and F/8? And i've seen alot of people saying they set the focus to infinity, but i'm pretty sure this camera doesn't have that. Or at lease i haven't seen it on there yet. Maybe it's called something else. Well thanks for the help anyone!

 

[aMac]

That camera still has a manual mode for setting both the shutter and aperture at the same time, so you should have no problem copying the techniques in this forum or elsewhere for taking lightning photos.

I can't SEE a way of setting the focus on that camera by hand, but assuming it's not pitch black and there's no obvious foreground, it should be able to focus just fine. Find a location and kind of lighting you imagine taking lightning pictures in and see if you can take landscape shots with longer exposures OK (ie.in focus, not overexposed and not UNDER exposed if you want your lightning shots to have scenery in). Then keep what you've learned in mind for when the next t-storm hits, take some more test shots and then when you're happy, try and get some bolts!

 

[WDodd]

I'm not exactly sure about the 710, but I know my P&S has a little bit of a delay from when you press the shutter until it takes the picture. Since lightning happens so fast I would imagine that would make it nearly impossible to do.

It would be really hard with a dSLR.

 

[aMac]

Nah, as long as the lightning is regular enough or you're lucky enough, with an exposure of a few seconds there's a fair chance you might catch some lightning eventually. Just be prepared for lots of duds till you get the magic shots.

 

[magnus1225]

How do you make it so that when i catch a bolt it's not all blurry/streaky. Like when you take a picture of a light and move the camera it's a streak of light. Can you fix that with lightning?