Until the last few years the best way to get really good pictures of lightning was with a still camera.  Even less expensive cameras with a manual shutter release could get great images.  But, having to leave the shutter open to wait for lightning to strike means that night is the best time to hope to get a good shot.  Otherwise, the film exposes right away in daylight or bright night lights.  Some people have been able to get good day shots with a reduction in the exposure setting if the background sky is dark enough and the lightning occurs soon after the camera is activated.

     Until recently, home camcorders really couldn't do a good  job.  VHS and 8 mm camcorders have too low a resolution to get quality anywhere near a still camera.  Making copies of good segments just made the problem worse with second generation quality loss.  Super VHS and Hi 8 mm camcorders did show a marked improvement.

     In 1996 SONY and Panasonic introduced the first digital home camcorders. The image quality surged to a new high.  There is virtually no loss in quality in making digital copies.  Finally, the video camera can compete with a still camera for great lightning images.

     The still camera gets the full lightning strike, all in just one picture.  Sometimes the sheet lightning causes the film to be overexposed with the result that the lightning channels don't show up so well.  For intracloud lightning the still camera gives the best shot...usually.

     With a video camera one can go back over a lightning discharge frame by frame.   Sometimes this reveals many interesting facets of lightning (very expensive high speed video cameras used in research show even more).  For example, the beautiful lightning branches in a typical cloud-to-ground discharge usually only appear on the first frame of the first return stroke (the visible part of lightning we see), with no branches for the other return strokes.  For another example, one can see the lightning progress across the sky in intracloud lightning.  The most spectacular intracloud lightning is the so-called anvil crawler which looks like fingers creeping across the bottom of the higher cloud known as the anvil because of its shape.

     The downside of the digital video camera for now is the expense. You need a digital camera, VCR, and blank tapes, all expensive.  To bring the images to your computer a digital video capture card is needed.  In time the expense will come down to more affordable levels.

     If you use any type of camcorder and VCR check out my tips (click that link at the left).