Happy 4th of July: Photographing Fireworks

Happy 4th of July everyone…

This year, we decided to visit the closest fireworks display to us, which happened to be at the Tustin High School Stadium.

Photographing fireworks can be a bit challenging. You are shooting in the dark, and your subject is constantly moving and disappearing. The first challenge is framing where you would have to anticipate where most of the bursts will occur, and adjust your camera direction and the lens focal length accordingly. A good approach would be to take a bit wider shots to ensure that the bursts are captured within the frame, and then crop later, if need be. Also set the camera and the lens to manual focus, and adjust the focus on infinity.

The second challenge is lighting. While you are shooting in the dark, your subject is actually very bright and so the highlights may easily get overblown. So while longer exposure times are needed, one would have to be careful with the highlights. As you know, the overall exposure is always controlled by three key parameters: ISO (sensor/film sensitivity), shutter speed, and aperture. A rule of thumb for fireworks shots is to put the camera in the Manual mode, leave ISO at minimum, set the aperture somewhere between f/8-f/11 and set the exposure time somewhere between 0.5 sec to a couple of seconds. Of course, one would have to experiment and adjust the parameters (mostly the shutter speed) accordingly.

Due to longer exposure times, a stable tripod is a must and a remote shutter release control is really helpful in order to minimize any camera shake and get sharper pictures. A good practice would be to leave the shutter in the so-called “bulb” mode where the shutter remains open for as long as the shutter release button is pressed. One could then control exactly when to open the shutter and when to close it depending on when the fire bursts occur. And to get multiple bursts within the same frame, and yet avoid extra light, it would be helpful to use a small black card to cover the front of the lens in between consecutive bursts while the shutter is kept open.

Photographing fireworks is always fun. Below are some of our shots. Hopefully, in future, we will visit other fireworks displays where more interesting foreground elements (buildings, trees, pier, etc.) can be captured as well and make the overall composition a bit more interesting.