Lightning

I've been trying to capture lightning for years, but to no avail...

until now. Suggestions? Anything you would do in post to make it look

nicer?

The lightning aspect of this photo is quite good, but the blurriness of the foreground lights and buildings are distracting and detract from the overall photo.

 

With the distance between the lightning flashes and the foregroung objects, I think using a lens with a higher f-stop would help increase the depth of field and bring all the elements into sharper focus, which would have greatly enhanced the asthetic qualities of this photo for me.

 

 

Actually, the foreground blurriness was caused not by a depth-of-field problem but by my shaking the camera. F-stop was already pretty high, but I didn't have a tripod set up, as this was a relatively informal shoot out of my open bedroom window when a storm passed through. I was steadying the camera against the window sill, when BOOM! Multiple bolts of lightning hit directly in front of me, and I was shocked, and I think I wiggled the camera. Fortunately, the lightning was gone so fast, the shakiness didn't affects its clarity. Unfortunately, the buildings had become very blurry.

 

I suppose I could combine this exposure with another one where the buildings are actually in focus... But wouldn't that be cheating?

Ahh, since camera shake was the issue, that's easily corrected. I'm not extremely experienced with weather / lightning shots, but when I have tried to shoot lightning, I've set my camera up on a tripod facing the direction of the storm and set my shutter speeds to 3-5 seconds. Then I kept shooting. Lots of trial and error and luck.