What if i told you that there is several kind of lightning that start way over storm cloud and goes straight up to almost 100 km. Guess what, this shit is real and people are making photos of it! The reason why not many heard about this is because it is very fast to notice, but with normal equipment lot of people was able to capture beautiful photography of this stuff.
There is plenty of lightning types happening ABOVE the cloud!
My friend is one of them, posting pictures in this amazing FB group! Check them out :) https://www.facebook.com/groups/376355972487572/?fref=ts
It is actually fairly easy to get a picture of them. There are basically two most common ways, using extremely sensitive industrial camera or normal DSLR. Take a look at those two pictures:
Picture taken with regular Canon 6D.
Detail of the sprites group taken with sensitive industrial camera.
To successfuly observe Sprites and others Upper-Atmospheric Electric Phemomena you need clear view to space above the storm. Therefore the storm itself must be 100's of kilometers away from you (that is where meteoradar and stormhunting pages comes in handy).
How to look for Sprites (and others)
Meet direct interaction between electricity in storm cloud and IONOSPHERE captured from Earth orbit:
I found perhaps the best how to tutorial on internet here:
http://www.astro.cz/clanky/ukazy/pozorovani-blesku-v-hornich-vrstvach-atmosfery.html
Would you be interested in reading similar highly detailed article in english?
Upvote me to 500usd and i will make it happen!!! (Looking at current makeup articles i think this price is very decent)
Beautifull high speed video of Sprites: