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- David
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I've never shot lightning before. My wife and I were watching it a fair way south of us on Wednesday (in Southampton); it was real wrath of God type but shots were impossible due to trees and buildings being in the way. On my train the next morning, a few people who travel from the Isle of Wight to London each day, said they'd watched it on the IoW Downs breaking up over the sea - now, that would've been a place to get some shots, although there was the potential of receiving an unexpected zap I guess.
At around 10pm, the lightning moved across and closer to us. I guessed it would need a relatively fast shutter speed to freeze it. 1/160 was the fastest I could get at f/4 and ISO3200. It was almost pitch black out. I had to manually pre-focus on the rooftop across the way. I had plenty of shots all black where I had missed the lightning. At 0.3 secs or so, a fair bit of colour was captured but was too slow for the lightning. After it had gone, I realised that I could've used the 50mm at f/1.8 - idiot!
Here's what it looked like straight out of the cam (there's no red line in the bolt in the original as can be seen in the thumbnail): http://milouvision.net/forum/LRSE.jpg
Away I later googled for this: http://www.weather-photography.com/techniques.php?cat=lightning&page=lightning
As a pal suggested, it seems that a good technique for night lightning is just to point the camera towards the lightning and leave the shutter open on a bulb setting. To quote:
"So, lightning photography is nothing more than setting up your equipment at night, setting focus to infinity, selecting the proper film speed and aperture, and open the shutter. Then wait for lightning, and when lightning occurs within your camera's view, you close the shutter (by unlocking the cable release) and advance the film for the next frame."
David
I know what you mean about having plenty of blank black shots too 
Not as easy as it looks, although I did use the 'bulb' method, keeping my finger on the shutter until the lightning appeared.
