Fireworks

I had another go the other evening at taking photos of fireworks.  It's harder than most people think, because you need to anticipate the fireworks going off.  For me, I often only get perhaps 1 decent photo out of 20.

One of the problems this time was the lack of wind.  This meant that the fireworks left a lot of smoke lying around and this tended to be illuminated by the exploding fireworks, so many of the shots had a white mist effect.  It is much better to get a clean shot the the fireworks against a jet black background.

But as I mentioned earlier, the difficulty is that you need to use an exposure time of about 1.5 - 4 seconds.  To get a clean shot you therefore need a tripod and a shutter delay so that your finger pushing the shutter release doesn't bump the camera.

This means you have to watch out for fireworks going up in the air, so you can trigger the photo and have the firework blossom while the shutter is still open.  Often, though, you get the timing right, but the firework is out of the frame.