Daytime lightning fails..

[TeamSAXON]

I am not normally photographing storms but had one roll through today in the day time. I have an SLT and thought to use a kenko ND 400 filter to keep the shutter open longer. The problem I ran into is lightning bolts not showing up in the photo, even when I've had a few in frame and caught them while the shutter is open.

I could not really find any information or troubleshooting as to why this is occurring. Every result from a search is either about which ND filter is best, how to use them for water etc. Nothing about it causing lightning bolts to be absent in the photo. I tried a few different settings:

5" F/14 ISO 200

10" F/14 ISO 200

10" F/11 ISO 125

20" F/11 ISO 125

Not really used to shooting lightning in the day, so I just winged it. What could be causing the bolt to not be present in the photo?

 

[drynn]

Were they lightning bolts i.e. forked lightning going to ground, or was it sheet lightning i.e. lighting the clouds but not a visible jagged line?

This is an 8 stop filter, what was visible in the pictures you took?

 

[Lan]

The problem is simply that you're shooting for too long, so the flash of lightning isn't much brighter than the ambient average.

If you want lightning shots during the day, you either need to stick the camera on continuous and shoot hundreds of frames at a normal-ish exposure ideally fast and bright, or you need a lightning trigger for your camera.

 

[mfinley]

The problem is simply that you're shooting for too long, so the flash of lightning isn't much brighter than the ambient average.

If you want lightning shots during the day, you either need to stick the camera on continuous and shoot hundreds of frames at a normal-ish exposure ideally fast and bright, or you need a lightning trigger for your camera.

As Lan wrote, and there are also two built in features of Olympus/OMD m43 cameras. Live composite & Pro capture that work for capturing lightning.

With live composite the camera takes an initial exposure of the scene and then while the shutter remains open the only light that now registers on the sensor is new light, IE lightening, fireworks... the initial exposure of the scene doesn't get overexposed the only thing that will get added is the lightening which you can just keep adding and adding lightning strikes one after another if you want to.

Pro Capture the camera is taking a series of exposures in the buffer continuously and writing over them until you stop it. For lightening you would point the camera in the right direction and half press the shutter, the camera is buffering shots, when you do see a strike you press the release all the way down and the camera takes the shots out of the buffer and writes them to your card, giving you a series of images that happened before you pressed the shutter button all the way down, so that lightening strike that just happened is now recorded.