The Rain Notebook

You may or may not know that I’m a professional photographer.  I love doing portraits and weddings.  That is my specialty.  However since I love being a photographer I take pictures of nearly anything, professionally and for fun.

One thing I’ve done for years and years is take pictures of fireworks.  And I need to tell you that it is super super easy.   You can do with just about any camera.

Ingredients:

Camera of almost any type

Tripod

Fireworks

Yes it really is that easy.  Most point and shoot cameras now and days have a self timer on it.  As well as multiple settings.   What you want to look at is a long exposure night setting.  You can probably get away with any of the settings but the ideal setting would be the night setting, then if you don’t have that landscape setting.  Heck some point and shoot cameras even have a fireworks setting.  So the more you know about your camera the better.

Now if you have a digital or film SLR you are doing great.  This is the easiest way to shoot fireworks as you are in more control.

To capture fireworks you need a still long exposure.  Its as simple as that.   Any camera that can give you that will give you great firework pictures.

How to take pictures of Fireworks

1) First you want to set up your tripod and aim at the general direction of where the fireworks will be coming from.  You might want to get to your location early since you don’t really want peoples heads in the way.  But for the most part you’ll be facing up so you probably don’t need to worry about it.  You also want to make sure that trees aren’t in the way or will be in the pictures.  Unless that is a look you are going for.

2) Put your camera on the tripod (I told you this was real simple)

3)  Set your setting on your point and shoot.  Or on a SLR and f-stop of 8-16 and the shutter speed of 1-6 seconds.  Less or more as you experiment with the shots.  At this point having a digital camera works great because you can adjust while the fireworks are still going off.

4)  If you have a remote or a shutter release cable for your camera use that.  If not then you want to set your self timer to go off.  The reason behind this is that you have such a long shutter speed that pushing the button to take the picture can cause camera shake.  You want to avoid that to have clear beautiful pictures of the fireworks.

5)  Relax and enjoy the show, and push that button every few seconds.  Its one of the most easiest thing to take pictures of!

If you have any other questions, google this subject.  There are lots of information out there that I didn’t cover.  I wanted to bring you the most simple way of going out there and taking pictures.

When you get the hang of it you may want to start doing different and fun things.  After all, taking pictures of fireworks year after year, they all start looking alike.  Last year I added intentional camera shake to this shot.  I really like how it turned out.  Get creative!!  And if you want to share what you did, put your online gallery’s link on this blog and I’ll be sure to check it out.

Have a happy and safe Fourth of July!