I totally cheated and started with my favorite shot. From here, the rest will seem boring. Sorry ’bout that.
Driving home from visiting my family, we had a big lightning storm ahead of (and behind, and generally everywhere around) us. That’s pretty normal for Florida, but what was different about it was that we could actually see a lot of sky. There are enough trees and houses near our house that I’ve never been able to try lightning pictures before.
The other complication: lightning storms usually come when there’s still a lot of daylight. Even though it’s overcast from all the clouds, it’s not truly dark. The key to good lightning pictures (or getting them at all, actually) is long exposures. You can’t do a long exposure when there’s a lot of light!
So, how to do this:
for Point-and-Shoot cameras, use a “nighttime” setting.
For dSLR, put it on shutter priority, and put the shutter speed as slow as it can let you go. Lower your ISO to the lowest number (unless it’s late at night that you’re doing this, and then that doesn’t matter quite so much, but it should still be on the low end).
Prop your camera on something stable. A tripod is ideal For these pictures, I put the camera on the dashboard of our car. I like the fact that the headlights are a blur in the shot! And since my lens is so heavy, I put my lens cap under the end of the lens to prop it up, so it was looking at the sky and not at the front of the dashboard.
Then…shoot! Again and again and again! You will have a LOT of throw-aways, but hopefully eventually you’ll get lucky!
Obviously, very active storms are easier to pull off, but if you’re patient you can get something good.
If you want to experiment with cool long-exposure shots in the car (just make sure someone else is driving!), you don’t even need lightning to make a fun shot. I liked the other-world-ness of this bridge at 70mph:
