Photographing Fireworks

November 5, 2009 by jamesbartholomew

PHOTOGRAPHING FIREWORKS (tonight is Guy Fawkes’ night)

My students this week have asked me how to photograph fireworks. Considering that tonight is the night (in the UK) where we let off a lot of rockets, here’s a quick answer to the question. I’m shooting some fireworks tonight, and will put the best results below.

1. Use a tripod if you have one. Use one anyway, as often as possible (look out for a future post of using ND filters during the day to create good effects with movement, especially water. You can’t get this result just by using a longer shutter speed!). If you haven’t got a triopod, brace the camera (in the vertical) against a tree, or nestle it in your clothes or on your camera bag.

2. Start with the following exposure: 400 ISO, Daylight White Balance, aperture f8 or f11, and shutter speeds between 1 and 10 seconds. Use Manual exposure settings, and manual focus, on infinity. Use RAW if you can.

3. Look at the results on your review screen (you’ll have to make any adjustments – change your aperture – sharpish, since the fireworks are over pretty quckly).

4. Set your camera (on the tripod) for vertical format, and use a wide angle view, with the baseline on the ground, and include losts of sky.

5. Using an exposure of 5 seconds or more lets you get several rocket launches in the same shot, but experiment with shots from 2 to 10 seconds, as too many explosions in the same shot makes the result very busy. One or two bursts is better.

6. Try moving your camera during exposure, and also use zoom blur (zooming in to out, or out to in) during exposure. Zoom blur is better on a tripod, but you can only do zoom blur on a DLSR, not a compact.

7.Use a cable release if you have one.

8. Go home and make some fireworks of your own, with someone you love. Fireworks are romantic.

Have fun. Send in some results and I’ll post them here.

6 November: RESULTS FROM BROCKWELL PARK SHOOT, LONDON

Since I’m giving advice on how to photograph fireworks, I thought I’d better go and shoot some myself.

The photos aren’t brilliant, but I’m happy with the results from 15 minutes’ shooting. These events are expensive (£10 000 is not unusual), so try as many different techniques as you can in the short time avaiable. I was shooting ‘blind’ for this one, as there wasn’t time to check the review screeen since I was concntrating on timing. I think the nearly full moon makes a nice touch, though it’s overexposed. I’ll put the exposure information in the titles.

Talking to several other photographers at the scene (always a good idea) there was one Spanish guy, a beginner, who was experimenting with zoom blur during his shots, which were less wide than mine (you can see the distortion in the building and ‘leaning’ people on some shots). His were good, and I may try some zoom blur at another local display tonight.

Also since I shot these all on 16mm (since I didn’t know how high the rockets would go) and cropped the hell out of the results, there are a lot of specks in the sky, which are either debris (there’s a lot of that around) or I need to clean my sensor (I’ll write a post on this). Mind you, with 21mp to start with on the 5Dmk11, there is enough to play with.

Anyway, here are some of the results. There are probably too many but I’m just chucking them up here. May take some down later.

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