Photography Class Can't Come Soon Enough!

We had a great thunderstorm last night--lots of lightning! I tried taking pictures, but was mostly unsuccessful. In the car, I had my cell phone camera, which captured a great picture, then told me the battery was too dead to use the camera and discarded the picture. Ack!

When we got home I grabbed "camera extraordinaire" and drove to where I had a clear view of the oncoming storm, only to discover that I have no idea how to set this camera to photograph lightning. I got lucky once and I'm happy about that, but the rest of the time the camera mostly refused to open the shutter at all. I think it couldn't understand why I wanted to take a photo in the dark, and I was not able to explain in the language of F-stops and shutter speeds that the camera could understand. I didn't think till now that maybe I could have checked the settings for this one successful photo, and set the camera that way again. I was too busy wondering why it wouldn't just do the same thing twice in a row. The learning curve for this camera is gigantic and I can't make my way up fast enough! Impatient! Impatient!! IMPATIENT!!!