I have never really tried storm photography in most cases it is really rainy so I dont want to risk damaging camera.
Have you tried longer exposure storm shots ? I am interested if sparks will be visible enough additionally having nice flowing sky.
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You should try shooting storms when they're far quite far from you or whey they're passing by, so you can see the structure but you don't risk damaging your camera because the precipitation core isn't directly above you ;)
According to long exposure - the last 2 photos in this post are the long exposures - the first one is about 8s and the last one is about 25-30s. Using long exposure is definitely the best way to shoot lightnings, but it works the best in the nighttime hours or during the evening. During the day it's usually to bright to make any longer exposures. You can try to use ND filters for making long exposure during a daytime, but it doesn't work good for capturing lightning strikes. The best way to capture them during a day is to buy a lighting trigger (costs about 300$) :)
Yea I was wondering if last 2 ones were long exposures, I do have some old ND filters (dont think any of them fit my lens though), and as general all my lenses are quite dark (old manual lenses) so as I generally do budget photography - using old manual lenses and all of them are full frame as well, so less light for my tiny aps-c sensor :)
Should try this some day....
TBH my lenses aren't so fast really - the fastest I have is the 50mm f/1.8, but I just somehow don't find it useful for storm photography - I use mostly my 10-22mm f/3.5 - 4.5 (actually every photo in this post was taken with this lens) and 70-200mm f/4 USM (for distant storm clouds, which I will show in next post with the rest of my storm photos) and I use the APS-C sensor too ;) But in most cases you don't really need fast lenses for storm photography, especially during the daylight - most of those photos above were taken with aperture of f/8 or smaller (bigger f number). It's good to actually stop the lens down a bit if the lightning conditions allow, because most lenses have best optical quality while stopped down by about 1-2EV - and additionally you are getting a much larger depth of field, so more of the scene is in focus and you don't have to worry about precise focusing that much. For example, the last photo was taken at f/8 - so you don't need to worry about f-number of your lenses ;)
This gets bit more complicated while shooting timelapses though ;)