Any one have experience getting a good shot of lightning on an M2P? Been getting a lot of heat lightning without rain lately in my area and thinking a good shot of it would be awesome. So far haven't been able to pull it off. Thought about maybe shooting 4k video and pulling out a still but not too sure yet. Anyone else have experience or ideas? I also tried a long exposure hyper lapse seems like I missed it every time.

Day or night?  That makes a difference.  You have 2 approaches...  If its daytime you'll want a big ND to drop the shutterspeed as low as practical (maybe 1 second or so, any more expect blur) and shoot in burst mode for the entire flight.  
The other option is to take a video and frame grab.  The major disadvantage of this is it'll be a crappy 8mpixel with compression artefacts so the quality will be significantly lower.

Night time is tougher exposure wise as any close strokes tend to blow out an exposure due to the huge difference in brightness.

Hi, thanks for the inquiry. We're sure that our valued DJI forum members would share the experience with regard to this scenario. Thank you for your support.

Hopefully your drone doesn't get hit

gnirtS Posted at 9-15 03:04
Day or night?  That makes a difference.  You have 2 approaches...  If its daytime you'll want a big ND to drop the shutterspeed as low as practical (maybe 1 second or so, any more expect blur) and shoot in burst mode for the entire flight.  
The other option is to take a video and frame grab.  The major disadvantage of this is it'll be a crappy 8mpixel with compression artefacts so the quality will be significantly lower.

Either or. I' more focused on just getting a shot to start with. I appreciate the input. I set the shutter speed way slow. I think I was like 5 secs and yeah blur was crazy plus I didn't get any lightning. Ill give 1 sec a try with large burst shots. thank you for the comments.

Lucas775 Posted at 9-15 15:24
Hopefully your drone doesn't get hit

Well I'm not planning on flying into the storm.  In fact I was nervous flying when the storm was a few miles away with only cloud lightning.  If I started seeing ground strikes I would have called it quits. I certainly hope I don't get struck that would really suck but I'm playing it safe and not gonna get too close.

I took a couple of fairly good lightning shots with my Mavic Air, that came out quite well.
https://forum.dji.com/thread-169019-1-1.html

Also took a few with my MP2, but they were far, and did not look well cropped. I love thunder, and South Africa has severe thunder, rain and lightning. Chances of getting struck, about as much as eating spiders, when not in Asia...........

Theres an update for youThank you to the guy who told me to shoot in burst. It worked out great. Im not the best at editing photos but heres what I got.

I've never had any luck capturing lightning. I had an idea that I plan to try if it ever rains here again. I figured I'd start recording video and save a single frame with lightning in my video editor.

FatherXmas Posted at 10-2 18:02
I've never had any luck capturing lightning. I had an idea that I plan to try if it ever rains here again. I figured I'd start recording video and save a single frame with lightning in my video editor.

Above they made a good point that extracting a frame ends up with compression artifacts. So here’s how I did it. Aperture wide open 2sec exposure. I shot in the pic setting multiple basically 5pics one after another. So I get 5 photos over 10 sec. just keep clicking only stopping to adjust the drone. I took almost 200 pics with 5 successes total. So even then it’s rare.

I have some experience capturing lightning bolts . Check out some of my posts for samples. I have done it mostly at night. Just shoot RAW and 1 to 2 second exposure and then shoot A LOT until you capture that sweet strike.

Nice work.

Great discussion.

Future project for me, I suppose.

Thanks!

John