Second Time’s the Charm
Some of you might remember my first attempt at fireworks photos (if you don’t you can read up on it here). It was a rather unsuccessful outing largely due to tripod restrictions that resulted in many fuzzy, out-of-focus shots.
Not so my second time around. Completely unexpectedly I ended up at a friend of a friend’s cabin on the lake where they were planning on sending up some fireworks. Being that I had missed all of the shows around July 4th I was quite excited to see if I could make some improvements.
Perhaps because this was impromptu I had no time to research fireworks shots so I had to rely on what I remembered. Tripod – check. Remote shutter – check again. Manual focus out to infinity – that was tougher. It was dark and I couldn’t see the symbols on the lens to figure which way was to infinity. Fortunately I guess correctly.
Shutter priority mode – played around with this a bit but ended up choosing a 8 second exposure for most of my shots – I like how this allowed multiple explosions one on top of the other in the same shot.
One note on fireworks – they can be dangerous. Even though we observed precautions there was one explosion that was misdirected and could’ve easily hurt someone. If you don’t know what you are doing leave this fireworks to the professionals. Stay safe!!
