Lightening Pics for Critique

I've just returned from Bulgaria where I snapped this.
I like the light and cloud formation but is there anything I can do to make it better?

All comments welcomed




iso 200 f5.6 30sec

Lightening, perhaps.

Crop in on the lightning.
Levels to bring out more contrast in the clouds. (I didn't realize this was over water until I turned up the brightness a bit. Levels should help.)
Is the color accurate? Still, you may want to bring our more of a gray or blue hue.

Do you have more than one shot that look decent? Merge them together to add more strikes.

Anyway, unless your in an area where lightning strikes are fairly common, ya have to be real patient. So good job.
Just interested in how many shots you took and how long before you got a good one? I was one up at the window for five hours until 3am to get a good strike. It was the only good lightning storm in 10 years in this area, so I wasn't about to miss it! (wife rather puzzled by my behavior but the photo is pretty good).

Many thanks for comments so far
The storm went on for about an hour with about 10 strikes per minute at times.

I'll try what you suggest on levels.
Here is one like you suggest but not merged - exactly as taken over 30s.

Much more dramatic and impressive!!
No way to get lightning other than with long exposures (or tremendously fast reflexes!!!) So even more impressive to get that many on one shot.
For my time behind the lens I got that many full strikes over the course of almost an hour. (lots of duds and tiny short trails -- so very jealous )

I always like to see where the lightning meets the clouds as well, but this is a certainly a step up over the prior one.

Thanks for the comments. But don't worry - I had lots of duds as well. Main problem was that there was also sheet lightening as well which gave me total white out on many shots that would have been good otherwise.

I'll keep trying with the first one but the sea will not brighten much without increasing the noise

A try at re-doing the first shot but with more impact - gray didn't work too well so I tried red.
What do you think?

There mint !!!!!can i ask if it's ok to copy and paste these cos i want one as my desktop

no problem - or you can send me a pm with you full e-mail address and I'll send you a larger version of whichever you want - or both.

Please don't sell them on though and thanks for asking

nice work.
we had a terrific storm out here last week. Tornados and everything.
I was stuck at home with the kids, Gerri was stuck at work.
I didn't have a great view from home, and didn't get any of the lightening, hail or tornados...
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You try and get a sitter to come out during a storm so you can get photos of a tornado, and see how many "ARE YOU F#$$%ING NUTS!!!" you get.
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Last time I was travelling by train I saw a few tornadoes. Small ones, all are rare in the UK but becoming more common every year. Didn't have a camera with me at the time though and it was so misty that the contrast in the shot would have been rather bad.

Tried to shoot lightning in the recent stormy weather but it was all over in the next valley.

Wow, I actually like the reddish color! There is a good contrast from the rest of the darker sky. I works well.
Very nice.

Nice work Roger, the last one is a peach of an image.

I've only ever seen forked lightning once up here in the cold wet north Kingdom.

Great photos. I really like the reddish colour to it - you should be rightly proud of that photo. I like the second one too - it shows what a fantastic storm you had.
I love a good thunderstorm!

Thanks for all the great replies.

It's the first time I've been able to try this with the K10D so I'm really happy they worked Could never have afforded to do this with film as I took about 40 shots just to get these and only got the exposure right because I could instantly see what I was getting. Aren't DSLR's great.

For Info I was really lucky in another respect - the hotel turned all its electricity off for the storm and there are no buildings on the point so there was no light polution at all

Watch this space - next time there's a storm I'll be out there

As everybody seemed to like the last ones so much I've been looking at some of the others I took and applied some of your suggestions to it.

What do people think?