My first attempts at imaging lightning strikes.
Click thumbnails to enlarge:
The first three were taken on 16th March 2012 during the same storm around sunset. The last was taken on 19th February 2012, just after sunset.
The second image before cropping actually showed that the strike did not originate in the low cloud but from a much higher cloud, the bolt shown all the way up but the background was so over-exposed that it had to be left out of the final image.
All were taken with my Canon 60D set to f/22 and ISO 100, with wide angle (10-24mm) lens. The first two were 8 second exposures at 10mm focal length; the third was 6 seconds on 16mm f/l; and the last was 30 seconds on 10mm f/l. All were subsequently enhanced and cropped.
I started with the wide angle lens to maximise the chances of capturing ground strikes. Next time I will probably use the same lens but at it's highest zoom of 24 mm to get a better close up.