I recently read some tips on capturing photos of lightning so last night when I was woken up by the crash, bang, boom of the thundershower going on I grabbed the camera and started playing around with trying to get a nice shot.   I can't say that I'm uber happy with any of these but in my defense a lot of the best lightning was obstructed from my view so I had to shoot what I could shoot.  I was also testing out different f-stop and exposure settings which when you're trying to randomly catch a bolt of lightning doesn't really lend itself to the trial and error approach.   Anyway, enough excuses.  Here ya go.    

It looks like a ghost castle but nice pictures, I like them.

haha, maybe it is. It's the Four Seasons Hotel :-)

Maybe someone who has some photo chops can help here but the problem I was having is that the way to catch the lightening is to have a really long exposure so you can open the shutter and wait for 10, 20, or 30 seconds for the actually lightning (it's near impossible to catch waiting and trying to snap a pic). When I had the low fstop the sky was way to bright and often washed out the lightning. When I had a large fstop I got the scary castle pics :-)

in the pictures its always beautiful..but when its time to watch in real life...im very scare of that....hahaha

I love lightning shots...great shots...I have quit a few from tucson arizona..they get some really fantastic strikes over the desert at night during lightning storms..I have a nikon n90 it's not digital its an older model

it is very tricky to catch the strikes. trail and error eventually solves this. - thanks for sharing dude...

Nice shots. I kind of like the creepy castle look

@GoodKarma: One of the best lightning shows I've ever seen was sitting in a sushi place in Phuket and watching the storm come in over the ocean. Wow. That was just breathtaking.

Hopefully I'll get some more chances to experiment around taking the shots. I would really like to get one or two spectacular pics for my personal portfolio.

hmm cool, so how did u adjust the camera to take these photos ?

@velvet: Nothing too fancy, just set it up on a tripod, point at the sky, adjust for manual settings and manual focus (50mm fixed lens) and then start experimenting around with the combo of aperture sizes and shutter speeds.

Spooky

did ya get the smoky head after?

Grew up in Arizona so saw alot of lighting storms get alot in AF also a about 6 months back one of the main buildings in the Fob I am stationed out of got hit by one and fried the simper and nipper lines and about all the guys computers tvs etc in that building it was so bad it cooked the number 2 ground wire and shut off the generator. Real great pictures at any rate