My advice would be to not multipost, and either cross post to related
groups, or keep the discussion to one group. There are a number of
replies in rec.photo.equipment.35mm.

Also, Joel, if you added a -- plus one space and one "Enter", you'll
create a sig delimiter which will be read by standard news readers and
everything below that will be removed in the reply. Then no one should
mind what's there.

 Try google with the search term Lightning Photography Exposure.
The lightning probably didn't register because your shutter speed
wasn't long enough to catch the flash.  Use the lowest ISO that your
camera has to lengthen the exposure time.  The first web page (URL
below) had a film photographer using Kodachrome 64 and Fujichrome
Velvia (ISO 50).  For night photography his technique, assuming that
the sky is dark enough, is to use the camera's bulb setting to keep
the shutter open and wait for lightning to occur before closing the
shutter.  His initial aperture is f/4 to f/5.6, but because
lightning varies in intensity, this is only his starting point for
setting the aperture.  Digital cameras probably can't keep the
shutter open as long as film cameras because of sensor noise, but I
suppose a DSLR wouldn't have much of a problem with an exposure of a
minute or two.  Most P&S cameras are limited to 8 or 15 seconds.
That's not too much of a limitation, you just keep taking pictures
in rapid sequence until lightning strikes, and with luck, that won't
be between shots.  :)

As he says, it's much more difficult taking pictures of lightning
when there's still light in the sky because it "can consume huge
quantities of film quickly".  But with a digital camera, that should
be no problem.  In addition to using the smallest reasonable
aperture, you can add ND filters in order to lengthen the time the
shutter can stay open without overexposing the sky and surrounding
terrain.

 The second URL is to a page describing the use of a digital
camera, and the suggested shutter speed was 10 to 30 seconds,
probably because the D70's lowest ISO setting was ISO 200.

 These two web pages provide pretty good information on the
subject, but they were the first two and the only two that I checked
of the many hits that google's search returned, so some of the
others may be even more useful.

 http://www.cimms.ou.edu/~doswell/ltgph.html

 http://www.lightningphotography.com/tips.html