All of us have seen some great images of dramatic lightning. Most of those images are taken at night. Those images are easy to take because since it is dark when there is no lightning (it is night) you can just leave your camera's shutter open with a small F.Stop until you have a good strike. Actually, most of those images contain multiple strikes that did not happen simultaneously. The shutter was just left open until three or four good stikes struck. Now go try getting images of lightning strikes during the day. Many photographers just reason that this is easy to accomplish as well because you can just make it dark by using a neutral density filter. Wait a minute, it is not that easy. At night the clouds are dark so you don't care how they look - in fact, the darker the better to make your lightning stand out. During the day they are not always that dark so you see more detail in them. A very long shutter speed (waiting for the lightning to strike) will show the clouds moving, and that just does not look good. You loose definition in the clouds. The rain pocket also moves leaving your whole horizon filled with rain rather than seeing just the pocket of rain.

          In the coming weeks and months I am going to write a few blogs on shooting lightning during the day. In my recent travels in Namibia, Africa I got many lightning strike images during the day. I will be sharing some secrets to help you get such images too. The image I am going to share today is not that great. The lightning strike is too small. There is not much going on. But I am sharing this image to make just one point. Please look at this image and just ask yourself how much interest lightning adds.

Once again, just like last week, we are in the Kalahari desert. The foreground does not offer anything of interest. I am using a wide lens hoping to get a massive strike that will fill the frame. That did not happen. So we not only have a boring foreground, but we also have a boring upper sky. The whole middle section of the sky is just without detail.

          The only glimmer of hope is the sun itself, but its presentation is not great either. Without the lightning strike I would not even have bothered to process this image. There is just nothing there for me. Now look at that lightning strike. Is that not interesting? Even though it is not large it adds a lot to the image. It gives you a center point of interest, something to focus on and study. It keeps your attention as you look at it.

          The sole point of today's blog is that lightning strikes add a lot of interest to just about any image. Why not try to incorporate them into your images? Why not try them in the day?