This year, I decided to take my camera out to one of the fireworks shows my family and I went to while vacationing in the San Francisco Bay Area. I’m here to share my experience and findings with you all to help your fireworks photos become better.
Before starting, being the person that I am, I searched Pinterest for any tips other people had to share on their blogs and sites. I knew I had one pinned, and so I started there before broadening my search to search all of Pinterest.
Now, I’m here to tell you that, while those tips are helpful, you do not need to follow them to a tee to get some great shots. Most will tell you to use a slow shutter speed. The intention there is to capture more of the firework, which creates that streaky look that you see in many fireworks pictures. But you don’t need to do that to get good pictures. It just depends on your tastes.What comes with these slow shutter speeds is a loss in the ability to shoot clear photos without a tripod. With this method, you undoubtedly need to use a tripod to get the clear shots you’re looking for. I didn’t bring a tripod on the trip, so this approach was difficult to accomplish. But I still got good results, even though I deviated from this method. Maybe I didn’t get the nice streaks. But I got shots that are still pretty cool, in my eyes.
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| Here’s a shot from the show |
If you don’t already shoot in manual mode, adventure over to the “M” setting on your camera (If you do, you can skip over this section if you’d like). Once you do, you’ll never go back to using the automatic mode. Manual mode gives you so much control over how your shots look. Shallow depth of field? Or great depth of field? Blurred motion? Or stop motion? You can decide exactly how your photos look. That is the beauty of manual mode. You’ll want to start by learning about aperture, shutter speed, and ISO, the factors that determine the exposure of your pictures and also how they look.
Aperture is the word that is used for how open your lens is. Small aperture numbers mean a bigger opening, thus more light will get through the camera (and a shallow depth of field, aka a blurry background), while big aperture numbers mean a smaller opening and less light getting through the camera (and it’ll produce great depth of field, aka everything clear and in focus). Shutter speed is how long your shutter stays open. The bigger the denominator of the fraction, the less time the shutter will stay open, as it is measured in fractions of a second. Bigger denominators can be used for stop motion, while smaller for blurred. ISO is light sensitivity, smaller numbers are less sensitive, but as you increase ISO, grain also increases.
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| Here’s another one of my pictures from the show |
You’re going to want to start by lowering your ISO (probably 100-200, 400 if you feel the need) on your camera.When shooting fireworks, you have to be prepared for a burst of light to show up. I didn’t take this into account at first, which led to not properly exposed photos. Meter your camera, expecting more light than the camera is reading at the time. This means increasing your shutter speed to avoid overexposure. On my camera, I found that “underexposing” what the camera was reading at the time by around 1 was about right, depending on the situation of course.
You should also know that timing is everything. This will take awhile to master, but your shots will reflect when you have captured the right moment. Sometimes, these will come at unexpected times, like the shot above. Just go for it and see what happens, and adjust your timing as you see fit. Typically, I found that anticipating the burst of fireworks to work the best. But don’t be afraid to take risks with your timing and when you shoot. You never know when you may come across an unexpected gem! Sometimes, those turn out to be some of your best shots from the shoot.
I cannot stress enough that it takes practice. Some of my shots from the beginning of the show weren’t that great. That’s ok. No one is perfect. But practice makes perfect (or near perfect). By the end of the show, I had a hold of how to manipulate my camera so that I would get the results that I desired. Now go out, take some pictures when you can, and go on an adventure!
