Photographing Fireworks

I've been asked how I take photos of Fireworks after posting a few from yesterday evening on social media and as there are sure to be some more displays about, I'll explain how I got my images.

Firstly I'm going to use an aperture of f8, the reason is that it will keep the fireworks pretty sharp and any smaller an aperture i.e. f16 starts to make the light trails thinner, so f8, f11 or even f5.6 will work well.
I set my ISO as low as possible to avoid noise (in this case 100) but 200 will be fine and I'm going to use the Bulb setting on the camera.

Right that's the settings, now to get the shots.

1, Use a sturdy tripod ....... Set the tripod up well before the fireworks start so you can get a good spot and look at what composition you are going to get, In this case I thought I would get behind the bonfire and the crowds, so I could add them to some of the images.

2, Use a cable release ........ to make sure there is no camera shake when you press the shutter button.

3, Focus ........ Now I always check my focus while it is still light, focus on a point in the distance roughly where the fireworks will go off (a tree or a building to get the focus) look at your lens and see what length it is showing, nearly always infinity, but don't just turn it to infinity because in most cases your lens will be out of focus, on my 24-70mm lens it showed right in the middle of the infinity icon.

4, Shoot Manual  ....... don't use auto focus or the lens will be struggling to find a point of focus, set your lens to manual and set it to the focal length you took earlier.

5, Take the shot as you hear the firework get let off, keep the bulb setting open for as long as it's needed for that firework, If you want to add more fireworks to the same frame you can cover the lens with a piece of black card (not touching it) whilst the shutter is still open to stop light entering it, then take it away when another firework is let off.

6, check you LCD to make sure you have all the light trail in and adjust your lens accordingly, I was between 24mm and 45mm for these shots.

7, try and get the best of your shots early on in the display before too much smoke from the fireworks hangs around and spoils your images, In this case it was quite windy and removed most of the smoke.

8, Enjoy yourself!!