July 4th Fireworks

This July 4th, I tried some Digital Photography of Fireworks using my Canon G5 for the first time. It was definitely very good opportunity to learn how to take pictures of fireworks. First, here are some of my favorite shots.

Flowers on the Fence F8.0, 8.0 sec, ISO 50
The Blue Eye F8.0, 4.0 sec, ISO 50	Red, White and Blue F8.0, 3.2 sec, ISO 50
Honeybees F8.0, 15.0 sec, ISO 50	Lilies F8.0, 15.0 sec, ISO 50
Rose Bouquet F8.0, 15.0 sec, ISO 50	Diamonds and Roses F8.0, 15.0 sec, ISO 50
Trees on The Beach F8.0, 4.0 sec, ISO 50

It was overall a very satisfactory experience. Myself and a couple of other friends were all set with our cameras and tripods 1/2 an hour before the show started. The show lasted for about 40 minutes. We played around with various shutter speeds and apertures to get the best shot without letting it to shine too much. I took total 68 pictures and the 8 pasted above are the best of the bunch. They've beat all my expectations. So what did we learn ?... Here we go .

Lessons Learned - tips on how to take photographs of fireworks

• Location, Location, Location. The location we had chosen was about a mile and half from the fireworks site. The level was excellent, with minimal obstacles in between. And the best part was, Wind was at an angle going in opposite direction. If the smoke is flowing in your direction, your pics would look like "smokeworks". Also, we hardly had to change the angle of the tripod once set. Another important thing to remember is that, make sure there are minimum other light sources in your field of view (unless it's a spectacular city skyline that would look gorgeous in the background of your fireworks !! )
  
  
• Tripod is a MUST. With long exposures (2 to 15 sec!) to capture the spectacle, Tripod is a MUST. Most of us cannot hold the camera steady for more then 1/60 second.
  
  
• Go all Manual. That's right. The best way to learn is try it out. Automated modes don't teach you anything. Here are the things I set up manually.
  

  Focus: Manual Focus set to infinite.
  

  Control Mode: Set to Manual "M" (on my Canon G5). This allows full control over Aperture and Shutter Speed. In other words, you control how much light will be applied and for how long. Camera's Metering is completely ignored.
  

  Aperture: Set to minimum. i.e. Maximum F number, in Canon G5 F8.0
  

  Shutter Speed: I tried various speeds between 2 seconds and 15 seconds. Longer exposures yield very interesting results as you can already see above.
  

  I even turned on ND Filter, a built in feature in Canon G5 that create a Filter effect that you'd typically use to decrease depth of field by widening aperture in bright sunny days without letting too much of light in. I just tried it because, I wanted to expose even less light, in order to make the pictures look finer, capture the colors better. But it helped in other unexpected way, it filtered out a lot of smoke!
  

  
  
• Composing the Picture I'd say don't worry too much about this. Take it for granted that you are going to have to crop the image once you download it. You can't predict where a shell is going to explode. Also if you zoom in too much, you may loose part of the explosion. Best is, zoom out to reasonable field, use maximum file size and resolution, do your framing offline by cropping. You'll have this luxury only if you have large flash memories and you are at a reasonable distance from the site.
  
• Releasing the Shutter You want to release the shutter without shaking the camera. Best way is to use the remote. That's what I did. But I missed couple of good opportunities while trying to point the remote correctly. So after that I started releasing the shutter by hand. This still didn't cause any problem, because the camera was firmly set in the tripod. Another reason why tripod is a must.
  
• Timing the Release. Lot of the otherwise excellent shots were ruined by falling debris. Although, this can create interesting effects, best pics have minimal of such debris. That's why the best time to release the shutter is right after the sky is clear and you see new shells shooting upwards. Oh and important thing, keep your finger on the release button, but your eyes on the show, not LCD . As you won't be worrying about framing, no need to look at the LCD anyway.
  
• "Do you have a flashlight ?" You will be asking someone else if you don't have one. And chances are that you will definitely need one if you have selected a good - dark - location, to set or check some controls of your camera. Keep a small and handy penlight with you.
  
• Try different shutter speeds Don't stick to a 2 or 3 second exposure, try various exposures of different lengths, you are not going to overexpose the picture anyway if u have selected a dark location, a small aperture and multiple explosions don't happen at the same spot. In Canon G5, once you select Manual mode "M", you can set both shutter and aperture with a single jog dial button!
  
• Don't try to get the "Finale" in a single long exposure It definitely will look like overexposed mess... Not pretty ! Instead, I could have taken it in multiple 1 second or smaller exposures.
  
• Take as many shots as you can Keep a lot of flash memory loaded and take a lot of pictures, you will find some very interesting shots in it.
  

I guess this is it. Hopefully New Year Eve fireworks session will be even better !

UPDATE : 8/6/2004 7:00 PM

Updated Exposure information in the images posted. Also below is a size adjusted version of "Flowers on the Fence" to give a persepctive of distance. Thanks for the suggestion "J".





-Saanga