Wow, but aren’t you a headshot photographer? Yes, I’m that headshot photographer that keeps popping up in your google search if you are in Vancouver but I like to use my equipment for more things.

About the main subject, “how to take great firework pictures?”. There is this question that pops up when I share firework images on social media, sometimes is the first comment, besides the good and bad ones there is the comment, “camera settings”.

Before I give all the details of how I do it, I really want to emphasize, you don’t need a high-end camera to take similar pictures. You can do this with your phone, you just need a way to remove the shake of your hand, something stable so you don’t introduce motion blur, and way to control the exposure time, that’s all. I could stop here, but I want to dive deep just a bit more of the details and possible problems you may find.

Settings

Manual focus.

You do not want to let the camera to start hunting for anything to focus during the fireworks, if you do it, it will back or front focus a lot of pictures. Before the fireworks, you need to set the focus to a point where you know they will shoot them. The launching area is usually a good choice as for security reasons, fireworks should go as vertically as possible. There will be exceptions, but don’t expect a big area.

Aperture.

F10-F11. Just in case you missed your focus point, better be sure and have a big area in focus. Here we may argue about diffraction, but the problem will come from the exposure time, that even at the lowest possible ISO, to get a decent trail, you may need 5-8 second exposures. If you use lower f stops, you are going to overexpose the image. Using ND filters is another option, but we could argue about the image degradation of ND vs diffraction at F10-F11.

ISO.

As low as possible. In my cameras that is 100. Fireworks have a big blast, even far away. My images are taken from more than 100m (300ft+) and some of the images with 5-6 seconds get overexposed.

Exposure time.

This is the one people don’t expect. BULB. Yeah, that option that lets you click your shutter, start a exposure, release it and finish the capture. The problem with this one is that a lot of cameras don’t have this option, if that is your case, I would try to average 6-7 second exposures.

Focal length.

The one that suits your composition better. This year I decided to go with 100mm or 110mm (remember Medium format, that is like 80-85mm) and a vertical composition. Some people will be closer and use a wider lens, some people may want to use a telephoto because they are far away. There is no rule for this.

Shoot RAW.

There are a lot of factors between captures that you can’t control that shooting in jpeg doesn’t make sense. You will want to reduce some highlights, remove some random elements.

You can see the drone trail at the top of the image. This one is not distracting. Easy to remove.

Equipment

Besides the obvious, some device to take images (I would use a camera and a lens), you want to use the following items to help you in the process.

Tripod.

You need something to hold your camera, just use one according to your gear. If you use a light camera with a light lens, is more forgiving than using, for example, my gfx100 with the 45-100mmF4. For the fireworks I was using the heaviest tripod I have.

Remote trigger.

You want to minimize the vibration of you pressing the shutter, and you don’t want to use any delay.

Technique

Disable noise reduction for long exposures.

A lot of cameras have this option that will detect hot pixels between captures and will remove them from the current image. For that, it will take an image, with the same exposure time with the shutter down. This means you will miss a lot of pictures if this feature is switch on.

Disable Sensor Stabilization

New cameras have this option and we like to keep it on. If the lens doesn’t have OIS, just keep it disabled. It will really mess with long exposures. You don’t want this enabled.

Pay attention to the launching area.

Once you see a trail of light, wait a bit (maybe 1 second, 2 max), press the shutter and hold it until the firework ends or you reach an exposure of 8 seconds max.

Take care as well of the brightness

Some fireworks will be super bright, it may cause some of the images to be overexposed.

Problems

Drones.

People like to use drones during these events. Believe it or not, they are usually respectful, and they understand that there are more people around them that want to enjoy the fireworks, want to take images, and don’t want to put anyone at risk with their activity. Drones are usually banned during these events for safety reasons, but the legislation depends on each country or place you shoot.

After you take your images, you can identify them by intermittent strips of light or alternating color lines in the sky. They will be outside of your frame 99.9 of the time but there will be always one individual that don’t respect the rest and will mess up your scenes.

The retouch can get tricky, and if you want me to make a video on how to get rid of such trails in software like photoshop or affinity, please just let me know.

Vibration.

Yes, even if your tripod is good, you may be in are with traffic, or wind, etc. That’s why I use the heaviest tripod I own, just to remove as much movement as possible and still some of the images may look blurry.

People.

Ok, this one is obvious, but people want to see the fireworks as well. They don’t care you are there with your camera taking more space than the rest. They will close to your gear, they may move your tripod and mess up your focus point and composition, they may get in front of your camera as well. Be mindful that unless there is some special circumstance that make you take pictures alone, you will be surrounded.

Watch out for your gear.

As mentioned before, there will be people close to you, if you have an expensive setup, maybe you want to keep an eye on it the whole time.

Lastly, if you like this post and some of the images that come with it, you can check the full gallery and get some prints there if you like (it really helps to keep doing photography).

Link to my full resolution gallery: https://josegerardopalmaduran.smugmug.com/Fireworks/