Painting the Dark with Lightning Bolts and Lightning Bugs
There are few things more nostalgic than catching fireflies. The smell of damp, freshly cut grass, the fading daylight, the thrill of the chase — it all comes rushing back every time I see those first tiny sparks in the dark. It’s one of my favorite summertime memories, and I’m so grateful my kids get to experience it too. The last couple of years have been unusually wet here, which I think is part of the reason we’ve had an unbelievable number of fireflies in late June. One of my favorite things has been to stand at the top of the hill and watch thousands of them rise each night, like floating, glimmering diamonds in the darkness. There aren’t many things that tempt me out of the house at night, but this is one of them.
For Mother’s Day this year, I was gifted the camera I’d been eyeing for a while — the OM‑1 Mark II. One of its most intriguing features is called live composite. It takes a base shot and then only records pixels that are brighter in subsequent shots. It’s perfect for things like cityscapes, lightning, and fireworks, where you want to capture light movement without blowing out the rest of the image. I’ve photographed fireflies before and stacked the images afterward, but I was curious to see how live composite would handle them.
Around here in central Iowa, the best firefly activity usually happens in late June and early July, but I couldn’t resist trying it out as soon as I saw those first twinkles in early June. For my first attempt, I wanted some prairie flowers in the frame, so I found a patch of butterfly milkweed and coneflower and set up my tripod. I set the exposure time to four seconds — one four‑second base exposure followed by a series of four‑second shots that would only record pixels brighter than the base (hopefully meaning just the fireflies). Then I let it run for as long as I dared. It’s always a balancing act: getting enough fireflies in the shot while hoping nothing else — a gust of wind, a curious dog — wanders into the frame (I’ll share some of those at the end). The nice thing though, is that you can see the composition in real time as you’re taking the photo. Then you can stop it whenever you get to where you want it. This time, I let it run for about two minutes.
The result was a lovely image, and the camera performed exactly as it should. It just wasn’t quite enough fireflies for my liking.
So I waited a few weeks and tried again. By then, the prairie plants had grown taller, and the butterfly milkweed — my all‑time favorite — had finished blooming. I experimented with other flowers and even played around with a flash to expose the plants without lighting up too much of the surrounding area.
My third attempt landed right at peak firefly season. Unfortunately, a storm was threatening to move in at any moment — the kind that produces constant lightning and likes to linger. It stayed just south of where I was shooting, which turned out to be both a blessing and a curse. The lightning gave me a bit of ambient light, but every so often a bright flash would blow out the entire frame, forcing me to start over. The breeze added some motion blur to the trees and plants, but between the big lightning strikes, I managed to get a few good shots.
The real magic happened at the end of the night. I climbed back up the hill and stood on my deck to watch the fireflies one last time. It was fully dark by then, and the lightning storm was still visible in the distance. I decided to try capturing both the fireflies and the lightning in the same shot. At first, there was too much lightning and not enough fireflies, and the sky kept blowing out. But as the storm drifted away, the lightning softened, and I was able to get some truly beautiful images.
It was a sight I’d never witnessed before — lightning and lightning bugs dancing across the sky together. And having a camera capable of catching even a little of that magic made it all the more special.
As promised, here are some examples of shots ruined by wind, light, animals, etc.
