Eagle Eye: Photography Techniques

Friday, June 1, 2012

Photography Techniques - Fireworks

Fireworks:
- To capture the brilliant light trails of a fireworks the settings are similar to Night Traffic photography.
- Use of a tripod is absolutely necessary since the shutter speed is very slow. Also, use of remote release or self timer is very useful to remove the shakes caused by pressing the shutter button on the camera.
- Use Shutter Priority mode to set a slow shutter speed (e.g. 10s) or use the Bulb mode to start capturing the exact moment when the firework starts and stop when it has exploded.
- Use a higher f/number between f/8 and f/16 to ensure that the light streaks are very fine lines of colors and not thick bright lines.
- Set a low ISO (e.g. ISO 100) for minimum noise.
- Use Manual focus since the Auto-focus won't work when you aim at the dark sky. Set the focus to a little less than infinity.
- Enable Long Exposure Noise Reduction setting if available in your camera to reduce the noise in the photo.
- Capture only few bursts of fireworks. Too many bursts will make the photo over exposed and cluttered.
- Add some buildings, landmarks or people in the shot. If you are capturing people (subjects) in front of fireworks, use flash and focus on the subjects. If possible, try to include water bodies like lake, sea or river in the shot to capture the reflections of the fireworks.
- Shoot in landscape orientation for capturing a wide area of multiple fireworks along with some background like buildings. Shoot in portait orientation if you want to shoot only the firework burst.
- Capture shots of the fireworks when they are just started. This way the sky won't be filled with too much smoke which causes the photo to be hazy
- Choose a proper location with wind blowing from the spot towards the fireworks, so that the smoke wont create a hazy photo.