Cpl Lens
A guide on how to shoot Fireworks
They inspire awe and admiration. They create fear and excitement. Fireworks light up the night sky on Independence Day and have become as much a part of the July 4 ritual as American flags and cookouts.
There are some misleading and incomplete information on the web about the technique of shooting fireworks.
For a long time, I had no idea how to shoot fireworks at all… It completely eluded me, sometimes I could get good shots and sometimes really bad ones.
Then on the day that I went to shoot fireworks, it dawned on me~! I had gotten it all wrong previously, unlike all other types of still or action photography; you have got to shoot fireworks like flash photography~!
Because fireworks form a trail via a small source of light traveling across the sky. That means quite simply, shutter speeds DO NOT matter as long as you keep the shutter speed above say 1/2sec as this small moving source of light that paints each trail will move away from one area of the image to another in that amount of time.
How do we control the exposure of the fireworks and its trails? You can only control it by limiting the amount of light entering the lens and to the sensor. In digital camera terms, you can control the exposure of the fireworks and its trail using:
Aperture – works by limiting the amount of light entering the lens at any one time
ISO – works by making the sensor less or more sensitive to light
Filters – Neutral Density or CPLs both work by reducing the overall amount of light entering the lens
And in practical terms, you can only guess how what kind of exposure you need for a particular fireworks display as distance from the display, atmospheric haze and the type of fireworks vary from display to display but a good starting point is around ISO100, f/16 or f/22 when you are around 500m to 1km away from the fireworks but I have shot displays that needed ISO50 and f/16.
What does shutter speed do? It’s for the background exposure. Or more specifically, the “stiller” parts of an image, in most cases, the exposure of buildings, etc on the image which is critical in “making a link” for the image to the real world.
So… meter the background and remember the exposure time or shutter-speed needed for a good background exposure at the ISO and aperture that you think you want to use for that shoot.
As a starting point, in most night scenes, ISO100, f/16 or f/22 at 10secs to 30secs should get you a decent exposure but as usual, it all depends on the location and effect that you are trying to achieve.
Then what do you do with the smoke? Treat smoke as if it’s one of the stiller parts of the image but do bear in mind that the larger the fireworks explosions, the more “smoke” you get on your image. How to avoid it? Shoot early in the display and pray to whatever god you believe in.
I heard people use blackcards to block lenses during firework shoots, what do they do and how to use them?
Blackcards are to make your fireworks look sharp and to select the patterns you want to “paint” in your image.
If you leave your lens to capture all the wobbly movements of the trails in the sky, do you think they’d ever look sharp? Therefore, it’s best to use blackcards to take “snapshots” of the trails, making the overall image look sharper which is especially important during the “explosion”.
The 2nd usage of a blackcard is to block out patterns that you don’t want in a display. If you have too many firework images stacked on each other at the same area of an image, you will get massive overexposure of those areas and the image will look very messy.
But do note that once you decide to use the blackcard, your effective “shutterspeed” decreases as you are not allowing any light to reach the lens when you block it with a blackcard, messing up with your background exposure.
I hear people use bulb mode to shoot fireworks, why? Combined with the blackcard, BULB allows maximum creative control.
BULB is useful as we as photographers normally have no idea how the fireworks display will go, when will which burst go up and where.
Thus, combined with the blackcard and us counting the actual exposure time, we can get only the patterns we want on an image and the exact background exposure that we want as well.
About the Author
Las Vegas PhotographerJasper Ferrer started his photography at the age of 19, He lives in Las Vegas and anywhere he goes, he brings his camera and start taking event pictures. Visit his blog at Las Vegas Photography for updates. Check out his Las Vegas Commercial Photography featuring food, architecture, advertising and trade-show portraits.
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