How Many tries to capture daylight lightning flash?

[Jack Rodgers]

Today my favorite edge of the Everglades was set upon by dark clouds 
and lightning and so I decided to try to capture an awesome photo of 
lightning over the Everglades (or what little is left of it after 
development, surgar, oranges and sod).

The problem is that during the daytime there is to much time to rely on 
a long exposure so one must hope that during a brief exposure there 
will be no lightning and that the human reflexes are not fast enough to 
see and take the picture.

So, with no expensive detection equipment, I had to rely on random 
exposures and hope that I would get lucky, sounds familiar?

So, supposing I would count to some number and then take a shot or 
shoot up to 10 exposures, how many pictures would you guess I would 
have to take before I capture a lightning bolt in daylight using a 
shutter speed of about 125th of a second. See, the flash has to happen 
during the 125th of a second I have the shutter open.

Let's disregard the question of how smart it was to stand on an 
elevated mound in a clear area holding an aluminum tripod, etc...

Oh, I was using a Canon 10D and a 1 Gig micro drive so I didn't waste 
film or spend a lot of extra money.

To offer a little tip: night time is the best time for the still 
photographer to capture lightning flashes and they can be dramatic. Use 
a slow film and a tripod. Set the camerea on manual rather than 
automatic and stop the lens down to its smallest aperature. Experiment 
with a series of exposure times, 10 sec, 30 seconds, one minute, two 
minutes, etc. Frame the sky using trees or buildings, etc if you like. 
A particularly flashy night helps since recording multiple lightning 
flashes during one exposure adds to the drama.

If you have a digital camera, shoot with abandon since you can erase 
the card and try again.

While I was taking the photos, someone mentioned that there might be 
equipment to sense the impending lighning bolt and thus predict when to 
take the pictures. Any ideas?

Oh, to save bandwidth on idle speculation, I was lucky and it took less 
than 200 random snaps to capture a lightning bolt in a photo.

---
10,000 trees may soon die in South Florida...

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