Photographing Fireworks: Gear & Settings for Newbies

Happy 4th of July!

I’m gonna try something new this Independance Day – photographing fireworks.

I’ve never tried taking photos of fireworks with my DSLR camera. I’ve used a simple point-and-shoot camera in the past, but this year I’d like to try out some long exposure firework shots to get some cool effects.

Could be awesome. Could be a disaster. We’ll see, and I’m planning to post the results (unless they’re horribly embarrassing) so stay tuned for that gem.

I just happened to try out lightning photography over the weekend because of a chance opportunity. It was pretty rad, so I’m hoping photographing fireworks will be too.

I’ve been putting a little research into the photo gear and settings I’m gonna use and I thought I’d share them before the celebrations get started in case anyone else wanted to try it out too.

The gear:

A tripod – I’m planning to take fairly long exposures so a tripod is a MUST. Otherwise the fireworks are gonna be super shaky.

Spare batteries – I cannot tell you how much it sucks to run out of batteries when you’re having an awesome time taking photos. Extras batteries are essential, and make sure they’re charged!

Spare memory cards – Same deal as the batteries! I always pack a few memory cards with me in case I run out of room on my first one.

A remote – I have both a wireless remote and a wired one. I think I’m going to try using the wireless one since the wired one might shake the camera. But either will probably be fine.

Wide-angle lens – My widest lens is the standard 18-50mm. So I’m going to use that unless I can possibly borrow an even wider lens from someone else.

Want more info on great photo gear? Check out 10 Photography essentials and what’s in my camera bag for ideas!

Camera settings for shooting fireworks:

Shooting mode – Bulb. If you’re not sure why you want to use bulb for fireworks photography? The answer is really simple: bulb mode lets you keep the shutter open as long as you want. AKA you can take suuuuper long exposures. Some people keep it open for hours to get those awesome star trail shots.

I’ll probably just be keeping it open for a few seconds, but since I’ll be using a remote, I’ll probably use Bulb.

Aperture – I’m planning to start with an aperture (f-stop) of 8 and see how that looks. I might go up to 14, but I don’t think any higher than that.

Higher aperture does mean darker photos though, so if the photos are too bright, I might have to use a high aperture to dim it.

If you need to brush up on what aperture is and how to use it go here

Shutter speed – Like I mentioned, I’m planning to do a long exposure. I think I’ll be starting off with 5 seconds, and just experiment to see what longer exposures – maybe up to 1 minute – look like.

The issue with doing longer exposures is that it will make the photos brighter, and might actually overexpose them with the lights from town around the fireworks.

The cool thing about long exposures is that it’ll make the fireworks look all smooth and pretty.

ISO – I want to keep the ISO at 100 if I can, and I sorta think that will work great. Since I’m more worried about overexposure than underexposure, the low ISO should be perfect – plus it’s going to produce the highest quality photos!

High ISO = More noise

Low ISO = Less noise/cleaner photos

White balance – I talked a little about using white balance to change the color of photos in this post but I’m not sure if I’m going to be messing with that too much for firework photos since the fireworks have their own distinct colors. I don’t really want to change the original colors of the fireworks, so I might try auto white balance and see how that works.

Extras:

Tequila sunrise – one of my personal favorites, which I plan to have while working on said fireworks photography.

We’ll see how this goes… Like I said I’ll probably be posting the results on here so keep an eyes out for that!

Have a great 4th!