So last night I'm chilling at home not really doing anything and I heard some fireworks. I wasn't really sure what about June 19th merits fireworks but grabbed my camera. Turns out they were for Middleton's BIG Event. Middleton is the nice suburb of Madison directly to the west and this is some festival they put on.

Anyway, I took some pictures from my balcony while getting eaten alive by mosquitoes.

 

How do you photograph fireworks man

 

You need:

tripod
camera with manual settings
remote release (ideally)

Here's what I did with a DSLR:

I had my 70-210mm zoom around 135mm ish. Shutter speed around 1 sec. Stop down the lens away from wide open, like f/5.6 or f/6.3 or something.

Frame your shot, focus on one of the fireworks, then turn off autofocus so it doesn't hunt around for focus in between fireworks.

Plink off a shot and play with the shutter speed depending on how it looks on the screen. I think I settled on like 1.5 sec.

Then it's just a matter of timing your pictures with the fireworks. I don't have a remote for this camera (yet) so I was just trying to push the shutter button without making too much shake and I have a beefy tripod.

Oh, and use the lowest ISO setting on your camera, don't want noise. Personally I shot RAW and did a wee little bit of tweaking in Lightroom, but the jpegs out of the camera didn't look too different.

 

Wow! the fireworks look so awesome.i must say that your camera is also great to capture such beautiful moments.Thanks for sharing the pics with us.

 

Here's a question. On my camera (XSi), there's a blue box that goes like 1/4, 1/25 so forth and so forth. What is that for. I'm trying to learn how to shoot in manual mode more then the regular modes.

 

than

 

Pretty. :eek3:

 

That's your shutter speed. Those numbers are the length of time (in fractions of a second) the shutter is open and letting light from the lens shine on the camera's image sensor.

For this purpose you want to turn the dial on top to M for Manual.

Check the "resources" sticky in the photography/photoshop subforum for tutorial links 'n such.

Or you can hit me up on AIM some time and I can sort you out.

 

Also Jae, if you are shooting handheld (without a tripod) you want to shoot at 1/60" or faster (i.e. 1/125, 1/250 etc). You will have to adjust the aperture to allow in the correct amount of light for a proper exposure.

 

June 19, 1865 is when they found out the civil war was over in Texas, and the slaves were free, AKA Juneteenth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juneteenth