Sometimes you have to make adjustments

Have you ever tried to take photos of lightning? To get the shots the professionals get you will have to learn your F stops and do a bit of time lapsed. Usually when you go for a shot manually you fire a little late resulting in a whiter sky. 

You can take lightning shots by hand. Below are shots taken with a pocket Kodak digital camera. The shots were taken by aiming at the sky and continuously taking pictures. Yes you will get a lot of photos of absolutely nothing, but, you can catch lighting.

The best part about digital, even with an inexpensive camera is that the photos can be adjusted by using a editing program. I like IRFANVIEW. It's free, and easy to use.

You may get a shot of an intense multiple bolt. But the camera allows so much light in it's hard to see what you caught.

The sky is illuminated like its daytime when actually it is night. Using the editing program you can make a quick easy adjustment by sliding the Gamma bar left to decrease the gamma resulting in this...

With that simple adjustment you can see what it is you actually caught.
By adjusting contrast, color saturation, and brightness you can even make it a more ethereal effect.

The cheap camera and simple editing program still won't bring it down to see the main bolt clearly. The main bolt is the white glow which proceeds down behind the tree line. The secondary bolts off the main are still pretty impressive.