Monday, May 18, 2009 at 1:21 PM Fireworks Photography
Photo by: Andrew Ebrahim
I've always loved watching fireworks and I've alway wanted to photograph them, so with the Victoria Day fireworks just a couple of hours away, I though I would do a post on how to shoot this beautiful display of colors and shapes. Shooting these kinds of events are a bit on the tricky side, more often then not you'll end up with a blurry mess of colors and lines. So hopefully after reading this, you'll be able to capture these explosions of colors.
Camera settings
This is where you have a bit of guess work. It's all about the timing and getting the right moment. You'll want to set your camera to its native ISO setting, whether that be ISO 50, 100 or 200, you want to stay low. This is to ensure that you have as little noise as possible and it will allow you to do long exposures without overexposing everything. With the aperture of your camera, you'll want to be shooting in the f/8 to f/10 range, I found this to be a good balance between the amount of light it lets in and the length of my exposure. Lastly, but most important, is your shutter speed. You'll need to play around with this depending on the size and what you want to capture in your photograph. Too short, you'll only capture a faint glimmer of light, too long and all you'll see is white overexposed fireworks. I shot between 2 and 5 seconds, and it gave me the results I was looking for.
Tripod
This will make or break your photos. With such a long exposure time, you need to have your camera on a stable platform. You want your camera as still as possible! If you have a cable release or a wireless trigger for your camera, use it. Also, you should tie down any straps you have attached to the camera or tripod, you'd be amazed at how much vibration can be caused by the straps blowing in the wind. If your tripod has a centre column, don't use it, it will just make your camera less stable. If you need to move your camera up, find a higher position to shoot from! You want to have the most stable position for your camera to get those tack sharp images.
Focus
Set your lens to focus at infinity and lock it there. If you can manually focus, great! If not, a small trick would be to use your cameras auto-focus to focus on the barge, or platform they are launching the fireworks from and then lock the focus by switching into manual focus and then recompose your shot.
Location
This plays a major role in how your photos will turn out. Arrive early, not just a couple minutes early, but hours early! If possible, ask the event organizer where the fireworks will be launched from, this will give you a good idea of where you should be. Get away from the crowds! Its great to be with people when your watching these shows, but when you photograph them, the less the better. You don't want the back of people's heads popping into your frame, or worse, someone tripping over your tripod and knocking down your entire rig. Try and find a place that is away from any obstacles, and that will cover you from the weather (wind, rain etc). Also, try and avoid stray lights, such as city lights and street lamps, they can cause flare in your images that you wont notice until its too late. If you are shooting close to other sources of lights, use a lens hood to try and remove as much of the flare as possible. Lastly, look at your entire frame, not just where the fireworks are going to be, but your entire frame! Check to make sure you don't have random objects sticking into the side of your frame, tree branches are notorious for this. That said, you want to find a unique location and make a photograph truly unique to you.
Finally, just a couple of small tips to wrap up this article. Bring a flashlight, if you need to change camera settings or look for something in you're bag, you don't want to be missing shots just because you can't see your buttons. Turn off your flash, when you're more than 5 or 10m away from something, you're flash is going to do next to nothing, so don't waste your battery on a useless flash. Bring different lenses, get shots that no one else has. Shoot wide, shoot close up, shot from up high or down low. Set your camera to the highest settings, this is usually in the form of uncompressed RAW images, you might not think you'll need it, but if you under/over-expose or want to tweak your images, this will give you the best quality. With huge files, you need to bring extra memory cards with you. When shooting at night, white balance your camera to tungsten, that way you'll capture the vibrance of the night sky. Last, but not least, practice, practice, practice! Practice taking your lenses on and off, changing your memory cards, know where the aperture and shutter setting are on your camera!
To make this image, I was shooting the pre-Victoria Day fireworks at Ontario Place. I shot this far from any crowds or any city lights. I'm actually not at Ontario Place, I'm across the lake! I took some of the usual images of just the explosions, but with the finally coming up, I decided to shoot with my fisheye lens so that I would get the city with the fireworks being reflected off the lake. I balanced my exposure to properly expose for the city, while maintaining the vibrance of fireworks.
Happy shooting.
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