Pennington County Storm

After a long day in Badlands NP my daughter and I decided to try to capture lightning. We drove north of Wall after dinner and watched the sky. It was fun to watch and quite an experiment in camera settings. We finally settled on a shutter speed of about 1-2 seconds to balance the brightness of lightning with the dark sky.

After the Storm

I went out after the storm last night to photograph lightning with Magic Lantern  firmware.  The firmware worked fine but predicting the direction of the strike was a problem.  Several times there were ground strikes outside the field of view which triggered the shutter but did not result in a dramatic image.  What did I learn in my first attempt?  Exposure for the ambient light gives the horizon some clarity.  I think the back side of the storm is safe with the lightning receding, this may be a false assumption.  The firmware works.

This was the western sky as the storm was clearing. Technical: Auto white balance was used to reproduce what I saw, the other choices did not seem real.