Last night, the annual fireworks extravaganza known as the Celebration of Light kicked off in Vancouver. The show – amazing fireworks displays choreographed to music – is a true spectacle and offers up a great opportunity for some amazing shots…if you know how to set your camera that is. Even pros can get this very wrong but believe it or not, even a cheap point-and-shoot can catch a magical moment. The sparkle is in the details.
To help snap-happy Vancouverites capture some of the glory for their computer screens and walls, the 12×12 friends at CBC Radio One’s On The Coast called me for some tips and tricks. You can hear the full interview right on their website but here is a more comprehensive rundown of how to capture those transient sculptures of light for posterity.
The 6 Rules of Fireworks Photography
Getting great shots of fireworks, whether they be the massive constellations created during the Celebration of Light or a simple sparkler, requires some basic understanding of your camera along with some basic planning. In short, it can be boiled down to a 6-point list:
- Long Exposure
- Slow-to-Medium Aperture
- Stable Surface
- Low ISO
- High Image Quality
- No Flash
1. Long Exposure
The human body is an amazing machine. One of the things it is incredibly good at doing is merging images. As a result, when we watch fireworks we see wonderful streamers and ribbons of light. But when we snap a picture of fireworks, we are faced with the grim reality: They are rarely actual streamers of light. For the most part, they are simple points of light that move through the air. And with a short shutter time, the camera only picks up a fraction of a second, leaving all these points of light hanging in the air disconnected from each other.
To capture the true beauty of fireworks, you need a longer exposure time: 2 – 4 seconds is usually a good setting. That’s easy enough if you have an SLR camera, but what if you only have a cheap point-and-shoot with no shutter settings? The answer is simple: Trick the camera. There are many ways of doing this, and they depend on the camera. If your camera has a fireworks setting you’re good to go. If not, you need to set it to either a “night” setting with no flash or a “party” setting with no flash. By omitting the flash, you force the camera to leave the shutter open longer and that means you get more movement in the light.
2. Slow-to-Medium Aperture
You may think you need a fast lens to take good fireworks photos, but the reality is you need a medium-to-slow aperture to get the good shots, especially if you are taking them from far away. An f-stop of between 8 and 16 will work best because it will give you a deep focus plane and produce clearer photos all around. Unless you are doing extreme close-ups like the sparkler at the top of this article, bokeh (shallow depth of field) should be avoided at any cost. Focusing on fireworks is pretty much impossible, especially with a point-and-shoot. A fast lens (aperture numbers lower than f4) pretty much guarantees blurry photos you’ll hate.
3. Stable Surface
The third rule comes as a result of the first: With longer exposure times you need a stable surface, otherwise everything will get awfully blurry. A photography teacher once told me no one can really hold a camera steady for more than a quarter of a second (1 / 15). This can be improved somewhat with optical image stabilization but even then you are pushing it with an exposure longer than half a second. In short, you need to put your camera on something.
The optimal solution for a stable surface is of course a tripod, but that’s not necessarily something you have lying around or something you want to drag with you to a fireworks show. Fortunately, there are many other options. In lieu of a proper tripod, any solid stable surface may do the job just fine. A table, a fence post, a tree branch, the hood of a car…as long as it is stationary and your camera can balance on it, you can use it.
You can also experiment with some stable body support: Your head for instance, is far more stable than your hands so simply looking through the viewfinder and holding the camera against your face will result in far less shaky photos. You can add to this stability by leaning your dominant arm against something stable like a fence, a car, a tree or a lamp post. It’s surprising how effective this is.
The bottom line is the longer your shutter is open, the more stable your surface needs to be. Experiment and see what works best.
4. Low ISO
ISO is a number that signifies the light sensitivity of your camera. The higher the number, the more light sensitive the camera becomes. But with light sensitivity comes film grain, or its evil digital sibling noise.
Back when film was the norm, we had to pick an ISO value in the store. With digital cameras you can usually set the ISO value yourself. That also goes for point-and-shoots, though you may have to search a bit or even crack out the manual to find the setting. Most point-and-shoots are set to Auto ISO by default. This is the worst possible setting for fireworks photography. With the flash turned off, the camera will panic, raise the ISO value to its highest point and in many cases, it will even add “exposure compensation” to further ramp up the ISO. As a result, your photo may end up being noisier than the actual fireworks.
The general rule for fireworks photography is to set the ISO to 100. It’s a very low number (for reference the “standard” ISO value in film is 200) but it produces very little noise and very clear photos. At the same time, it forces your camera to create longer exposures.
5. High Image Quality
A photo is only as good as its image quality. Fortunately digital cameras, even the really cheap ones, now produce very high quality photos…as long as they are told to. For unbeknownst reasons, many cameras have a default setting that is not the best quality possible, and a lot of people roll the quality back as well.
When you take photos of fireworks, you should always set the image quality as high as possible. There are two reasons for this: First off, you will want to zoom in on the image later on (fireworks look amazing up close) and secondly, you should frame your images quite wide when shooting fireworks so you will more than likely do some cropping afterwards. The higher the quality, the more cropping you can do without losing resolution in the process.
6. No Flash
I worked as a photo developer and retoucher for 3 years while in university. More than anything, I walked away with one observation: On-camera flashes were invented by someone who really hates people. The number two photo problem (after cropping people’s heads or legs off) was incorrect use of the flash. The best example of this is clearly visible when you go to large sporting events or concerts. Every time you see a flash go off you can rest assured that photo is going to look terrible. Why? Because an on-camera flash is meant to illuminate objects no more than 3 meters away from the camera. In other words, if you take a photo of something far away using a flash, the camera will assume the object is properly lit and expose it accordingly. As a result, you get a horribly underexposed photo with washed-out colours and some really bright objects in the foreground.
Think of it this way: When taking photos of fireworks, you are taking photos of light, not illuminating the subject. So turn the flash off. As a bonus, this will also force the shutter speed up and give you longer exposures.
Bonus: Landscape Mode
As mentioned in point 2, focus is a challenge, especially with a point-and-shoot. Auto-focus will not work in this type of low-light environment and leaving it on may result in blurry photos or a camera that refuses to even take a picture at all. To circumvent this issue, try setting your camera to Landscape Mode. This will set the focus to infinity, which works well for any object farther away than 8 meters and the camera won’t bug you with flashing focus lights.
Other Tips and Tricks
- Get to the location early. Chances are there are some serious photographers out and they will stake out the best spots. Tag along and get the best view.
- Stand up-wind. Fireworks use black powder, and black powder makes a lot of thick white smoke. Standing up-wind means the smoke will blow away from you and cause fewer problems with smoky photos.
- Take a lot of photos. It’s hard to guess when a particularly dazzling firework will go off, and if you see one and then click the shutter release, you’ll only get the tail end of it. Shooting more frames means you’ll have more chances of getting that great shot.
- Shoot wider frames. Don’t zoom in on the fireworks themselves. The best fireworks photos are always the ones that have something else in the foreground or background. Try to frame your photos so that you get reflections off windows, water or other people. That way the photo also has a scale reference. A bridge or building in the background gives scale to the light show.
- Experiment with your settings. If you have a digital camera, you are blessed with the ability to instantly review your shots. That way you can mess around with the settings on your camera to get the best possible shot.
- Catch the beginning of the show. More often than not the end of the show is the best, but it’s also the smokiest. White smoke tends to pop out in photos so you are likely to get the clearest fireworks photos early on in the show.
- Have fun. Spending too much time focusing on getting that perfect shot will ruin your experience. Try to have fun and enjoy the show as you snap away.
For further reading, Digital Photography School has a great article on the subject with hundreds of comments that offer additional tips.