I was not really planning on photographing the fireworks on July 4th, because I was enjoying a short vacation with my family at Glenwood Springs. When I was told that the fireworks would be fired from an open area behind the hotel where we were staying (less than several hundred feet away), I decided to take the challenge and see if I could capture anything interesting from that close of a distance. As I pointed out in my how to photograph fireworks article, it is generally not a good idea to stand too close to fireworks. I wanted to see what other challenges I would face, considering that I only had two lenses with me – Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8G VR II and Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8G, shooting on an FX body.
The camera already had the Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8G mounted on it and I was too lazy to change it – the wind outside was too heavy and I did not want to go back into the hotel. Well, when the fireworks started, after taking the first several shots at 70mm, I quickly realized that I needed to change the lens to Nikon 24-70mm instead – the Nikon 70-200mm was too darn long:
It took me several minutes to swap the lenses and as a result, I missed more than half of the show (the whole thing only lasted for about 5 minutes). When I resumed shooting, I kept wasting time zooming in/out and refocusing, because even 24mm was too short at that short of a distance. I then changed the orientation of the camera to vertical and left the lens zoom at 24mm, after which I was able to capture a few OK images, nothing spectacular.
Lessons learned:
- If you are standing very close to fireworks, make sure that a wide-angle lens is mounted on your camera, or very close to you in case you need to swap.
- After changing the lens or focal length of the lens, focus on fireworks right after they explode – the scene will be bright enough for lens to acquire correct focus.
- Using a remote shutter release in “Bulb” mode truly rocks! You can manually start the exposure right before the explosion and wait as long as needed when the fireworks start fading away.
About Nasim Mansurov
I was working the weekend, but after reading your tips on fireworks shots, I decided to take a couple hours off to attempt some firework photography downtown. It was a lot of fun! Probably the best fireworks Bangor, Maine has ever had!
I found 4 seconds or more was a bit too much due to wind and the amount of fireworks they were launching. They wound up blurred or smeared. So I raised my ISO to 400 and dropped the shutter to 1 to 2 seconds, and that seemed to do the trick. I too used the 24-70mm f/2.8 and for my distance it was about perfect. They weren’t launching very high anyway due to cloud cover.
Thanks for the tips! Hope you had a great vacation with the family!
http://www.aaronpriestphoto.com/2010/07/09/fireworks-bangor-maine/
Aaron, those are beautiful shots you’ve captured, I left a comment on your blog.
By the way, a couple of things about your new blog:
1) Your facebook integration plugin lets a user sign into the wordpress admin page (wp-admin) as a regular user. Not a big deal, but I would disallow visitors from being able to log into the wordpress admin page. You can either protect the directory with an .htaccess file or use a different facebook connect plugin.
2) I would get rid of the Year/Month/Day in your URL for shorter URLs and better SEO. Go to Settings->Permalinks and set Custom Structure to “/%postname%” (without quotes). Save and you should be done.
Let me know if you have any questions :)
Nasim
Very good tips/suggestions! Thank you very much! I’m still playing around with plugins, and hadn’t discovered the potential security issue you mentioned. I’ll have to explore that when I get home later this weekend. Out of curiousity, what plugin are you using? WordPress is still a new world for me… :-)
Aaron, you are most welcome!
Yes, you have to be careful with WordPress :) I see too many blogs getting hacked on the Internet lately…
In terms of plugins, I use many different ones to do different things. For example, I use Lightbox Plus for image viewer effect, NextGen gallery for the site gallery, Subscribe to Comments for comment subscriptions, etc. Let me know what plugin interests you or if you would like to see the full list of plugins that I’m using and I can email the info to you.
I have been using WordPress for years now and I’m quite familiar with it, so let me know if you have any questions.
I meant which facebook plugins specifically. There are a few out there.
Oh, I see :) I’m using SFC – Simple Facebook Connect. It works great so far! :)
Really nice at close-up, just like abstract.
Thank you Dennis!