New Years Fireworks

My Night Photography Unblocked video course has been a big success, and I'm already working on the Advanced course. So what did I do on new year's eve? Record a video on how to shoot fireworks of course! Here's a sample from the video I captured on the night, and below that, some quick tips for the next time you want to try shooting fireworks and a slide show of the processed photos!

Fireworks Photography Tips

• Most fireworks displays happen in the city, and having a foreground element in your fireworks photos really adds to them, so try to include another element in the composition with the fireworks.
• Use a tripod, as the exposures will be several seconds long.
• Use a two second timer, or even better a cable release. You can trigger by hand but you may get some wobbles in the light trails. A 10 second timer will take too much time so use your finger if you don't have a cable release or two second option.
• Use auto focus on distant city lights, then swap to manual focus so your camera doesn't hunt around for focus costing you valuable seconds.
• The aperture will determine how bright the fireworks appear, the shutter speed how many fireworks appear in the shot.
• You don't want to burn out the colour in the fire works, so I suggest an aperture of between f8 and f16.
• Leaving the shutter open too long can cause there to be too many fireworks in the shot, making it possibly appear too busy and messy. I suggest starting with 10sec.
• Adjust your ISO around these values to get a good exposure for your foreground element. A lower ISO is better for less noise however. Probably between 100ISO and 400ISO.
• During the display you can try changing your settings for effect.
• As the display goes on, you get more smoke in the scene, so your best shots will probably be the early ones. Feel free to experiment later.
• If you have time and feel up to it, try zooming in with a longer lens to fill the frame with the fireworks. This can look very different.

Fireworks Photos from New Years 2013