Blackheath Fireworks 2008

A couple of friends kindly invited me to the Blackheath Fireworks show, held this year on the 8th of November.

I ended up with my camera, the Nikon IR remote and a tripod to achieve the result below.

There were thousands of people at the event, so instead of trying to get right in close to the crowds, I set up shop a safe distance from the throngs of people. I set my camera’s shutter speed on ‘bulb’ and used the remote to open and close the shutter at will. To get nice crisp results I set the ISO at 100 and show at an aperture in the region of f8, manually set the focus. Then it comes down to timing. With fireworks you have to look for the rockets as they shoot up into the night sky, open the shutter just before they explode and then decide when to close the shutter. Firework bursts look pretty during their burst, but soon become fairly messy, the last bit of the light burst is often the bit you don’t want in your photo. I would ordinarily open the shutter as soon as I could make out a rocket shooting up and expose until just before the end of the burst. There was plenty of trial and error but I eventually got the result I wanted with consistency.

Update:  Popular photography blog petapixel.com did a feature here on shooting fireworks and included the tip I provided via twitter.