To some people it is a time to have fun and to some people it is an opportunity to practice the night shot. Yes, slow shutter, tripods, lights and fast movements. This year I’m rather pleased with some of my shots, since I actually brought by tripod again. Last year I came out with very little usable night shots simply because I can’t be bothered to bring a tripod (so I can do more things with less hassle).

Slow shutter hand held

That doesn’t mean that without a tripod you can’t take any picture, all you have to do is know your minimal shutter speed, ISO and steady hands. The shot on the left was shot hand-held at 1/30 s, f/3.5 ISO 800. The resulting image shows how fast the movements were and it actually gives a hint of happy people on board the ride. Thanks to the bright lights from the ride itself, the children on board were illuminated quite well!

Here’s another picture (right) that I took hand held, good lighting in the venue really helps with these shots. When it comes to fireworks however, there is no escaping from using a tripod. There are also different pointers and tips that I’d like to share with you when taking picture of fireworks.

Photographing Fireworks

If your camera is capable for full manual control, this is the time to switch it on. Forget about auto-focus and auto exposure, most camera will not be able to calculate the settings correctly. What I did was:

1. Set the focusing to infinity. Auto focusing will be quite hard or impossible since there is nothing to focus in the sky until the moment the fireworks started and it’ll be too late.

2. Set your aperture high to preserve the details (around F16 and above).

3. Set the speed around 2-4 seconds. With this low speed, the fireworks trails can be recorded and more fireworks can be captured.

4. Set the camera trigger to wireless remote (or you can set timer for 2 secs or lower), this was needed to avoid camera shake by hand when pressing the trigger button.

5. Arrive early to get a good (and if possible comfy) spot.

And that should do for the settings. As for the picture taking, I mount my camera on the tripod and adjust the position to where I estimate where the fireworks will be displayed. Then, just enjoy the show while snapping the pic (peering into the viewfinder and adjusting as well obviously).

Moomba Fireworks

The picture on the right was taken using f/25, 4 s, this way the fireworks trails was evident and the smoke appears hazy. There are a lot to learn about photographing fireworks and I’m still learning as I go as well. However the pointers above are the ones that I have learnt and applied for a while. The fireworks was not the only exciting thing however, there was this rock band playing pretty good music too.

Of course because this is a photography blog, I can’t help but to share a bit of phototaking for these kind of situation. A band, low light and glaring spotlights, requires something more than full automatic settings.

I shot those two using spot metering and speed priority mode. In order to get the singer’s face into the correct exposure, spot metering on the face is needed, otherwise the camera will think that the scene is too dark and it’ll boost the exposure. Usually leaving us with very bright white faces…overexposure. On the other hand I left it to the speed priority mode to get a decent hand-held speed (about 1/200 for the above shots) while maintaining the correct aperture settings automatically. Apart from that the iso was set to 1600, a bit grainy, but it does the job.

Hmm…and the last thing, I can’t help but think that some clown statue can be quite scary…they should be made cuter or funnier…