How to Shoot Fireworks
by Greg Thurtle

As a wedding photographer I often get asked to photograph bride and grooms at the end of the night with fireworks in the background, sometimes even from a boat!

Often when I show people the photo's on the back of the camera they wonder how I get such great fireworks images. So this is going to be the topic of this article.

The best way to photograph fireworks is to use a tripod (you can get away with handheld but this is much harder and is a hit/miss affair and requires more practice)

So once you have a tripod put your camera on it, making sure its secure and isn't going to fall over. Also if you're attending a organised display – make sure your tripod isn't going to trip anyone up – sometimes at displays they even let you go at the front if you ask nicely.

Camera Choice

The camera to use is one that lets you have control over the shutter speed. Ideal settings are from 1 second to 30 seconds – anything between this is fine. Your camera should be capable of letting you have control of the shutter speed, you'll need this to be able to get good firework shots. Good shutter speeds for fireworks are from 1 second to 30 seconds – depending on what you want the image to look like. The longer the shutter speed the more firework explosions/movements you'll be able to get into your image.

A compact with manual control or and digital SLR are good for this.

Camera Settings

First thing to do is set your camera to the lowest ISO/sensitivity you can – typically this is ISO100 or ISO200. This means you'll get the best image quality. Don't worry about the fact it's probably dark worry you – fireworks are very bright.

The thing to remember with fireworks is that the sky will be very dark and the brightness of the fireworks last for a fraction of a second. So what you are aiming to do is open the shutter before the firework goes off and for it to close after it's finished. This will give you the big pop of the rocket exploding. This is why setting a long shutter speed is an advantage because you can press the shutter when you hear the rockets being launched and capture the explosion. If you want to get multiple exploding fireworks then set your shutter to be longer – like 30 seconds this gives you a good chance to get multiple fireworks in the shot.

If you have control over aperture on the camera then also set this to f/8 – this should be a nice and sharp aperture for 99% of all lenses. If you're using a compact then using f/5.6 will do fine as you'll get plenty of depth of field with this.

Focusing

One thing with fireworks is that it's dark and you can't normally focus fast enough on fireworks. The best way to shoot fireworks is manual focus, you should focus to infinity (you can do this by focusing on something far away, this will mean the fireworks will also be in focus. Once you've focused then switch to manual focus and don't touch the lens/settings.

So that covers the exposure and focusing.

Composition

So we've got the technical side sorted, next you need to decide where to point your camera. This can be harder than you think. The temptation is to want to get a massive firework exploding central in your frame right smack bang in the middle. This is very very very hard as you'd have to know how big the radius of the explosion is, wind speed, and velocity and trajectory of the rocket to ensure your lens is pointed in the right spot.

For this reason I recommend a wide composition, I typically use a 24-70 type lens set at anything between 24 and 50mm (18 and 35-ish on APS-C based dSLRS). This gives you enough room that you can crop in later to make the firework more central but means you have a much better chance of getting the whole starburst in.

If you like it also means you can get some of the trees or other skyline in to help add context to the shot too.

So that's the basics of How to Shoot Fireworks – hope you enjoyed the article let me know your feedback and thoughts tomorrow.