Photographing Fireworks

The Fourth of July was this past week, and with it came my first chance to try and take photos of fireworks.

More after the break

The trick with taking photos of fireworks is that you need a long exposure, which means you need a tripod to cut down on camera shake. I found an OK spot to shoot from and set up my tripod. It helped that the fireworks had already started, so I at least knew which direction to aim.

I used my 18-55mm lens. I briefly toyed with using my zoom, but realized I would need the wide angle to get all of the explosions.

I set my camera to Full Manual (M) mode (nothing Auto will work here) and tweaked my settings. I set my ISO to 100, my f-stop to around f10 (at least for the shot below). I tried different exposures. The setting for the photo below was 8 seconds.

The one problem, as you can see in the shot below, is that some were really overexposed. But, this was still a fun project.

I used some really long exposures for a few shots, such as a minute or longer.  I did try a trick I read online–during the really long exposures, I would hold my black camera bag over the lens in between the fireworks going off. I don’t know what this did, if anything, but it was a fun trick to try.  I think the idea is that it help cuts down the exposure.

I’m normally bored by fireworks, but this made watching fireworks fun again 🙂