Fireworks!

Taking photos of fireworks is really difficult, the many articles written on it notwithstanding. I’ve had some lucky shots, assisted by a lot of preparation and patience. For one thing, you’re asking the camera to interpret a moving object, capture it, and present it beautifully. When you see a gallery of great images, it’s important to remember you’re likely seeing the best that the photographer got–not by any means every shot he took during that shooting session. There are a LOT of rejects!

My first attempt at photographing fireworks was with my first digital camera, a Fuji FinePix A303. It wasn’t a first-generation digicam, but it was pretty early.

The camera chose the settings, and these turned out “not bad” with an aperture of f/2.8, shutter speed of 0.5, and ISO 100. I was pretty impressed that a point-and-shoot digital camera could do that well.

Sometime between the set above and the set below, I got a newer camera, a Canon Powershot SX110 IS. It was a little “smarter” than the Fuji camera was, and had some settings I could change, a fact that I didn’t discover for a couple of years. But it got these images down in Gulf Shores, AL. The main disappointment I had with them was that the camera just didn’t process black very well, and on a large screen, the sky looked dark blue instead of a nice black. These used an ISO of 800, and all the images used an aperture of f/4.0 and a shutter speed of 1/8.

Fast forward several years; new camera, still learning the settings, and a last-minute decision to go see fireworks. If you’re trying to shoot pictures of fireworks, it’s a good idea to avoid making settings adjustments in the dark on a fairly new camera. Photographing fireworks is a lot of guesswork for an amateur anyway, because you have to kind of try and predict where in the sky the explosion will happen, and time the shutter to capture it. You have to decide whether you want an instant shot or catching the motion of the fire. You have to hold the camera steady (tripod!–I did have one, and I did use it, and I was glad I did, and it still wasn’t failsafe). Oh, and bring a chair, because you can’t do this standing up and sitting on the sidewalk for half an hour gets less fun as you get older.

I shot 273 images last night. Many were junk, like this one, just plain overexposed. The camera went nuts with whatever setting I set for it in the dark, and just started shooting frames, and the best I could hope for at that point was maybe having the camera pointed in the right place at the right second; this one obviously got a lot of light for a long time. The camera was making the decisions, the ISO was set at 3200, aperture at f/4.0 and shutter speed at 1.3

Some turned out really neat, even though I moved the camera during exposure, like these.

ISO 3200, aperture f/4.0, shutter speed 1.3.

The movement of the explosives and the slight movement of the camera made something interesting and useable, but not as an illustration of how to take pictures of fireworks. ISO 3200, aperture f/4.0, shutter speed 1.0.