Stuff I learn - photographing fireworks

 I am interrupting my stream of food truck posts, in order to share newfound knowledge that I recently acquired.  By recently acquired, I mean "last night."

'Tis the season for fireworks. Photographing, has always sounded like fun.  I tried last year, and failed miserably.  Now, with another year of photography practice under my belt, I am trying again, with much better success.  Here is what I have learned so far:

1. Settings

For these pictures, I set my ISO at it's lowest setting (200 on my D40).  This should reduce noise and hopefully help keep extraneous stuff out of the shot.

I turned my aperture to its smallest setting, 29 I think on this particular lens.  I figured this would allow me to have the whole field in focus, as opposed to just some of the explosions being sharp.  I might experiment later with actually trying to focus a certain distance and opening the aperture up a bit.

Set the shutter to "bulb" or manual.  I use a remote to open and close it.

It's weird, as I write this, because I am saying that in order to shoot in the dark, you want to set your camera to settings that make it look like you are not trying to let any light in at all.  In a sense, you are.  You only want the brightest stuff coming in, and you don't want any noise.

I put the camera on a tripod, and picked an area of sky to shoot.  Then, I used the remote to open the shutter, and left it open until fireworks started.  Then, when I thought I had a good amount of action recorded, I close the shutter and let the camera process - which took a very long time.

Here are some results:

This shot highlights a problem, you have to time your shutter release so that you have composed a nice, clean image.  Here, I left the shutter open too long, and the next mortar came through and uglied up a nice shot with a white, fiery trail.

It is weird to frame a shot, not knowing where the action will be.  It is also weird to just leave the shutter open, trying to imagine how the picture looks as you stack explosion after explosion on top of themselves.

If you leave the shutter open too long, the sky isn't as black, and the shot can get too busy.




I also noticed an interesting phenomenon, look at this shot.  It looks like little heartbeats in the fire trails.  It looks faked, but it absolutely is not.  I assume it is the result of the shock wave of subsequent blasts after these had already exploded.

That's what I learned last night.  Hope it's helpful.