Among my many creative side projects, photography, (specifically landscape & travel) has been one of the longest-running.

Like most photographers, I’ve always had something of a photographic bucket list in the back of my mind.

Over the years, I’ve managed to check some of the images off the list, while others have remained persistently elusive.

Last week, however, I was finally able to capture one of those elusive bucket list photos I’d been chasing for years: A lightning strike.

Part of the reason this photo had taken so long to check off the list is that capturing lightning in a photo is highly dependent on luck.

• There’s the luck of being in the right place at the right time when the storm rolls in.
• The luck of being able to find an interesting viewpoint or perspective.
• The luck of having your equipment available and ready for use.
• The luck of lightning striking at all, let alone in a pleasing or interesting position within the frame.
• And the luck of having the shutter open when it does.

This reliance on luck doesn’t just apply to capturing lighting in a photo, however. It also applies to that feeling of capturing lighting in a bottle with any business or creative project.

The good news is that there’s a lot we can do to load the dice in our favour and improve our luck.

The process of improving our luck and increasing our odds of capturing lightning in a bottle can be boiled down to to two distinct phases.

Phase 1: Preparation

If we want to improve our odds of harnessing and capturing lightning with our creative projects rather than getting struck down by it, the first phase is to prepare ourselves.

This preparation consists of two parts.

Equipping Ourselves

When I say I hadn’t captured a photo of a lightning strike until last week, it wasn’t for lack of trying.

Over the nearly 10 years I’ve been practicing photography, I’ve trained my camera on brewing thunderstorms many times. On a number of occasions, I’d managed to capture small, feeble forks of lightning. But never anything truly impressive.

In addition to the time spent out in the field, I’d read articles, watched YouTube videos, and spent hours experimenting both with camera settings and editing techniques.

And while that past effort may have felt wasted in the moment, all of it was essential to setting the stage for future success.

The importance of this period of equipping ourselves can’t be overstated.

While lightning might be captured in a single moment, that moment is almost always preceded by an often years-long period of equipping ourselves with the skills and resources that allow us to grab hold of the opportunity when it presents itself.

In addition to skills and resources, we develop, however, proper preparation also bestows us with another, harder to measure trait that is essential for grabbing hold of our lightning bolts.

Honing Our Intuition

We often think of lightning as a rare and unpredictable event.

But this couldn’t be further from the truth.

There are many places in the world where thunderstorms are a regular–even daily–occurrence for at least portions of the year.

Add to this the fact that we’re typically able to see thunderstorms coming from a distance, and that most storms consist of dozens of individual strikes and it becomes clear that there’s actually an abundance of lightning available for the catching.

Once we’re equipped, then, the next step is getting ourselves into position to make the catch.

Before we can get ourselves into position, however, we need to be able to recognize when the conditions are brewing to create what I call The Potential for Interesting.

In some cases, we can rely on weather forecasts–industry reports, trends, and data–to predict the approximate times and locations of this potential.

This type of forecasting is valuable in getting (and keeping) us prepared.

But our chances of catching lightning in a bottle drastically improve when we’ve developed the intuition to recognize the quickly changing conditions that portend a gathering storm from the ground, and understand innately where and how to position ourselves to take advantage of it.

This intuition is built up over years of missed opportunities, wrong guesses, and failed attempts.

And it’s these attempts, even–if not *especially–*those that end in failure that are the key to developing this type of reliable intuition.

While you can study the theory and mechanics of any craft, industry, or pursuit, intuition can only be earned through experience–lots of it. Most of it leaving you with nothing to show for it.

And while this phase of creative development is frustrating, beneath the surface, the foundation is being laid, our instincts being honed, and our odds being improved for future success.

Phase 2: Practice

Regularly creating and publishing our work equips us with the skills and intuition that will form the foundation of our ongoing creative practice.

But the positive effects of our creative practice can be multiplied by adding a liberal dose of patience.

While our intuition might be enough to get us into a promising position, we’re almost certainly going to have to wait (sometimes for an extended period) for lightning to strike near enough for us to capture it.

There are two distinct types of patience needed to catch lightning in a bottle. To understand them, it helps to understand the mechanics of capturing lightning in a photo.

Outlasting Boredom

Far from a high-stakes, guns-at-noon shootout requiring a lightning-quick trigger finger, the challenge of photographing lightning is outlasting the inevitable boredom that sets in during the process.

And it’s this ability to outlast boredom that is the first essential form of patience for capturing any kind of lightning.

For last week’s photo, I saw the storm gathering and set up my camera equipment on my balcony around 9:30 pm.

Then I pulled up a chair… and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

After 30 minutes without capturing anything interesting, I thought about packing up and heading in.

An hour in, having captured a kind-of interesting (yet unremarkable) image of lightning cracking inside the clouds, I thought about it more seriously.

But the storm persisted, and so, I decided, would I.

The shot I ended up using was captured around 10:45, but all told, I sat outside with my camera for more than two hours as the storm rolled southward across the city.

Regardless of the project we’re working on, the patience to sit tight and persist when nothing interesting seems to be happening is a pre-requisite for achieving anything interesting.

It’s also one of the defining traits separating professionals from amateurs.

Amateurs are always looking for the drive-by, quick win.

They hear about a hot new trend–be it drop-shipping, TikTok, Clubhouse, NFTs, or whatever comes next–abandon whatever they were doing before, buy into the hype and try to hit it big. When they fail to see immediate results, however, they grow bored and start looking for the next hot new thing.

Professionals, on the other hand, enter a space with the Potential for Interesting and are content to sit tight and wait while the conditions continue to develop.

As a result of this patience, professionals tend to find themselves in perfect position when that potential becomes reality, often well after the dabblers and the amateurs have moved on.

But the willingness to sit outside, passing the time as the storm builds is only one type of patience required.

Putting Up with the Misses

I ended my two hour sit out on the balcony with one interesting photo.

This one “hit” was in addition to several hundred “misses”, uninteresting photos that I deleted immediately.

When it comes to catching lightning, this type of success rate is par for the course, both with photography, and any kind of creative work.

**See, the only way to capture lightning in a photograph is to press the shutter and hope that lightning happens to strike while the shutter is open.

As a photographer, this means that going in, your assumption is that almost 100% of the photos you take will be useless, mistimed, uninteresting images. But while these “misses” might be useless as images, they’re an indispensable part of the process of capturing that one “hit” image that stands out.

Because the more time the shutter is open, the greater the chance of capturing a strike.

The same concept applies to any creative medium.

We can position ourselves in the heart of a thunderstorm, but if our shutter isn’t open when the lightning strikes, we have no hope of catching it.

Keep the Shutter Open

We can think of the amount of time our shutter is open as the surface area our work covers.

If we only published a new podcast episode, blog post, or video sporadically every couple of months, we don’t give ourselves much surface area to capture lightning when it does strike.

If, on the other hand, we’re publishing something new on a regular weekly or even daily basis, the surface area of our work increases, and our odds improve.

The more ideas we put out into the world, the deeper we explore those ideas, and the longer we stick with them, the more opportunities we give other people to find and resonate with them. We can further increase that surface area by focusing on evergreen content that will remain relevant for months or years after we publish it.

This is the equivalent of increasing the shutter time on a camera.

It’s almost impossible to capture a lightning strike when the shutter is only open for 1/30th of a second.

Leave the shutter open for 30 seconds at a time, however, and set the camera to automatically take one 30-second shot after another for an hour, and the process of capturing a lightning strike is reduced to a simple waiting game.

While our odds may have improved, however, we still need to continue to open the shutter again and again and again, publishing new work with the full knowledge that most of it won’t get noticed, catch on, or produce any kind of meaningful result, regardless of its quality.

And it’s this patience that is where most creators fall short.

Many creators have the skill and intuition to catch lighting in a bottle with any one of their creative projects. Few, however, have the patience to get into position and then wait patiently for their lucky break to strike.

In one sense, the act of capturing lightning will always be entirely unpredictable and dependent on luck. No matter how highly skilled, intuitive or patient we are, we’ll never know exactly when, where, or how lightning will strike, after all.

In another sense, however, we can actively improve our luck to the point that we can have some confidence, perhaps even certainty that if we prepare our practice and remain patient, sooner or later we’ll end up with a crackling ball of energy in a bottle of our own.

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This article originally appeared in my weekly Creative Wayfinding Newsletter. Each issue is the product of a week of work, and contains something not available for sale.

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