Practice makes perfect...well, not yet

Not perfect yet by any stretch of the imagination, but much better lightning shots this time.  If the weather of this summer continues like its been, I'll have plenty of opportunities to get better.  More storms rolled through here last night and after my experience Friday night I wasn't as gung ho to go out shooting.  Besides, it was 10 pm.  Then I had an idea (Oh no).  I grabbed the camera and headed over to the lake.  Due to having boat rights, I can access the lake 24 hours a day.  The boat landing would give me a perfect view of the incoming storm and if the rain came, I could actually sit in my car and still get great shots out an open window.  The rain never came thankfully and the lightning put on a great show.  The only thing missing was my tripod.  I left in haste and it got left behind.  You'll notice some blurriness of the shots.  This is due to the fact that night shooting requires super long exposure times.  In other words, I click the shutter and keep it open for times up to 90 seconds.  The good thing, keeping the shutter open that long allows you to click and wait for the lightning to strike since all the camera will record is the light when it happens.  The bad thing-  try holding a camera super steady for anything more than 1 second.  Very difficult.  Also, you'll notice the different colors of the sky.  This wasn't necessarily any artistic effects. On several shots, you see alot of white lights on the far shore of the lake.  Most of those are the lights of houses by in each shot you can see triple lightning bolts coming down.  Pretty cool. And if you doubleclick on them you can see the seperation of the lightning through the clouds as its coming down.  There was much experimentation in how long to keep the shutter open and the color of the sky is affected by how long that shutter was open.  All in all, a much better experience than Friday night.