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A Guide To Shooting Great
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When searching for a place to shoot the display, look out for things to use to enhance your images. Flood-lit buildings are great for giving a sense of place, while water can create amazing reflections to add an extra element to your pictures.
Unless you've been to the same display before, trying to predict where many of the fireworks are going to explode can be tricky. Some rockets can go hundreds of feet in the air before they create their light show. The wide-angle end of a standard zoom will give a broad enough view for most displays, but if you have one it's also worth taking a wider angle lens just in case the some rockets go much higher.
| TOP TIP -While the results can be pretty hit or miss, the unpredictability can lead to some great images. Don't expect every shot to be a winner so shoot plenty!.. |
If there's a fire (or floodlights) near to the primary display you can include the light from this to give your shots an extra glow, rather than simply recording the fireworks against a black sky. As the subject is much brighter than the surroundings the exposure times are a little more hit or miss than for just the fireworks themselves, so experiment with shutter speeds and aperture settings.
How To Set Up Your Shots
The intermittent and unpredictable nature of fireworks means that the automatic exposure systems will rarely give you good results. Instead you'll need to set the camera to manual exposure mode and set the shutter speed and aperture yourself. As it will be dark then bright as the rockets explode, it's also very difficult to use the metering to gauge the exposure needed. Although you're working 'in the dark' when it comes to exposure it's not as difficult as it first appears, as there are some handy tricks that will help you to get the results spot-on.
Try Using A Tripod
You'll need a longer shutter speed to capture several bursts than if there are loads of fireworks going off in quick succession. For most displays a shutter speed of between 8 seconds and 30 seconds will give you plenty of action. Your shutter speeds will run into several seconds, so you'll need to put the camera on a tripod and release the shutter using the self-timer, or ideally a remote release to combat camera shake and keep your images crystal clear.
Select The Manual Exposure
The light will vary from almost pitch-black to bright during your exposures, so you need to select the manual exposure option and ignore any reading from the metering. With very little light you'll find that the auto-focus will struggle, so set the camera to manual focus. As you'll be some distance from the subject set the focus on the lens to infinity. The shutter speed is more about the number of bursts that you capture than the exposure of the result. When it comes to ISO, set the camera to the lowest ISO possible lo minimize noise. You can try fast settings such as ISO 800 or 1600 to allow you to shoot portraits using the glow of the bonfire, but expect plenty of noise or grain.
Aperture & Shutter Speeds
With the camera set to ISO 100 you should try exposures at apertures of f/8 and f/16. As a guide, if you're close to the fireworks use f/16 and if you're shooting from a distance use mainly f/8. If you're using ISO 200 then set f/22 for close subjects and f/16 for distant displays. The shutter speeds are less critical than the aperture for the brightness of your image, but they do however affect how many bursts and how much of the display you will record in a single frame.
The unpredictable nature of the position, color and shape of each firework explosion means that no two shots will ever look the same. But follow our advice and you'll be able to get some stunning fireworks shots yourself.
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