My first attempt was at the International Festival over the Memorial day weekend at the Eastern States Fairgrounds in West Springfield Massachusetts where they had 5 night of awesome fireworks. I took those shots with both my Nikon D90 with a 24-70mm f2.8 Sigma lens and the Nikon D5300 with a Nikon 50mm f1.8 lens. I pretty much used the spray and pray technique. I shot a ton of rapid fire pictures with a fairly slow shutter speed of anywhere between 1/25th of a second all the way up to around 1/100th of a second. This speed is almost fast enough to stop the action but not quite. They came out cool but look is a little different than I was hoping for. My aperture was set around f11 with an ISO of 200.
I shot at the East Longmeadow fireworks over the Fourth of July weekend and used a different technique than the first time.
I used my Nikon D5300 with the Sigma 24-70 f2.8 lens along with a tripod and a shutter control cord. My camera was set at f10 with an ISO of 200 and my shutter was set on Bulb. For those of you that don't know what the Bulb setting is, it basically holds the shutter open until you close it. You depress the shutter button and hold it down for the desired amount of time than release the button which closes the shutter. This allows the you to capture the entire firework shot or multiple shots in one frame. I held the shutter open anywhere from 3 seconds to 15 seconds depending on how many explosions I wanted to get. My focus was also set on manual. I moved the focus on the lens to infinity and then bumped it back a bit.
I would hear the cannon fire off the firework and depress the shutter control button then wait until the firework bloomed fully to release the button. I held it open for multiple blossoms as well. A tripod and shutter release cord or remote is essential for this type of shot as any movement from the camera will be seen with such a long exposure.
This is the type of look I was looking for.
This shot I held open for 2 firework blossoms
Firework shots are also fairly easy to create composite images in post processing as well. The following is an example of a composite from the East Longmeadow fireworks;
This was 3 different images combined to make one final image with Photoshop.
Fireworks are fun to shoot and as long as you have the right equipment your shots should be solid. The settings I shared are a good starting point and you can make some small adjustments if needed as you go.
I hope you liked the info and thanks for reading,
E
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