Trying to catch lightning C&C Please

[TexasAggie07]

Howdy guys,

I am still fairly new to photography and very new to post processing so any comments and or critiques are greatly appreciated!

I shot all of these with my Cannon 60D with an 18-135mm lens in bulb mode and processed in Lightroom 4.

My own personal critique is I may have gone overboard on the post processing... the sky has a very unnatural tint to it and I think a tighter crop (less trees more sky) would have been better. The last shot is obviously out of frame from the money shot but I liked it too much not to go ahead and include.

Thanks for viewing!

Lightning 1

18mm f/8 ISO 400

Lightning 2

18mm f/8 ISO 400

Lightning 3

39mm f/8 ISO 400

 

[Tony S]

I'd say take the camera off of auto white balance and go with one of the pre-sets (I would start with the flash setting) so you get consistency from shot to shot. Find the adjustment mark on your lens for focusing distant objects and use that for focusing. 68" is too long...... hold your shutter open for a count of 5-10 and then let it close, keep doing this until you get a flash of lightning to capture. Release the shutter when you see the bolt form, it goes pretty quick and doesn't take much. I found that by the time you see it and react to it to let the shutter close you have the shot. If you are in Texas, then you get lighting storms that last a while so you should be able to experiment with settings to get it down. Unlike here in the Northwest where we think a bolt or two in four hours is a good storm.

 

[Joel_W]

Tony S gave you some rock solid advice. And yes, you really over cooked the PP. The purple sky should have told you to back off till it once again became natural looking. I'd also re0-crop so that a min of 75% of the picture is sky, and not black ground. The action is in the sky. If you can't get back to the original sky, try a B&W conversion. You just might be surprised at the pleasant result.