my first ever thunderstorm timelapse

vimeo.com/262759641

 How long do you set the time for each shot , and what exposure ? And what is your camera ?  Great pic too.

 Which is unusually short for my lightning photography. I normally use between 20 and 30 second exposures for lightning stills, deoending on how fast I think the cloud is moving. You are really only trying to catch an actual flash, so the whole picture is likely to be completely dark if no lightning happens in that time. or if multiple flashes happen during that 20 or 30 seconds, you get all of them on one exposure. Normally using ISO200 and f5.6. Because I was trying to do a timelapse, I needed a lot of frames, so I went down to 3 second exposure. This meant that ambient light ( of the full moon) had no chance to light up the cloud. I shot one just before that of a storm in a different direction, using 10 second exposure( the timelapse linked above)--this actually turned out better as there was more detail in the cloud from ambient, and you don't need to push the exposure so hard in post-processing. Pushing exposure hard on a very dark shot just gives bad noise. But the trade-off was less exposures over a given time, so it's a juggling act.

My camera is a Pentax K-70, which is considered a very good mid-range DSLR, with a Sigma 18-125mm zoom.  I do lots of timelapses, and post some up on Vimeo. It has become abit of an obsession since I got this camera, because it has a built-in self timer, and you can set the timer from anything to minimum, which means the shutter re-opens as soon as possible after closing, and right out to ? hours. this is very good for lightning photography. Just pick the bit of sky you reckon it's happening, set the self timer to Minimum, Manual mode,with exposure time to 20 or 30 seconds, aperture F5.6 , and press Start. You can then sit back and drink beer if you wish, just glance at the instant review after each shot on the flip-out screen to congratulate yourself on what you are capturing ( or not )

 Great capture