Tips and Tricks for Fireworks photography .... what I learned on my first attempt.

  I can't claim to be an expert nor will I claim these are the best fireworks images out there. But I was really happy overall with my first attempts, especially considering the tremendous handicap of not having a cable/remote release and resultant blur from having to operate the shutter manually. This will really be a recap of what I learned on my first run at shooting a fire works show. Most of these things were things I learned theoretically from research and finally was able to put to a practical test.

  Lesson one- gear- You can get good pics of fireworks with a point and shoot, or your phone. But the DSLR is helpful because you have a lot more control. It's still luck, but your chances are a lot better. Much less shutter lag, longer and more easily controlled exposure times, etc. There are workarounds for all of those, but if you have the big guns, this is a good time to break them out and use them.
  Regardless of the camera you are using, a tripod is a necessity (or some convenient camera stabilizing device) since you will be doing long exposures. I had packed light for the trip to Rhode Island and wasn't thinking about fireworks when I packed, so I left my tripod at home. When I decided to shoot the fireworks, I needed something, luckily one of the local shops, Hunt's Photo and Video had some small travel tripods on sale. (not to mention they were a really cool bunch of folks, hung out with them for a bit) I wound up grabbing a MeFoto Backpacker. In red and black, of course. Would rather have gone with the sturdier RoadTrip, but they were out of stock. Will probably do a longer review later, but  the backpacker is certainly convenient and portable. It isn't as sturdy as my main pod and I wouldn't put Excalibur on it with anything bigger than the 24-70mm, but it held that combo for the shoot and it will be more than sufficient for the D3200 as well.
  A cable release or some other form of remote shutter release is also mandatory. I was using my triggertrap app on my iPhone, worked great for the test shots, then of course it stopped working when it was showtime, so all of these shots were done with finger on the shutter release, on a lightweight tripod that could only just hold the camera weight, so if you look closely you'll see some blur, especially in the foreground elements. I have since learned that when the phone dips below a certain battery percentage, the app automatically cuts out. Note to self, charge phone prior to planning to use as a remote release.

  Lesson two- Get there early. Scope out the area, find a good place to set up, figure out what lens you will use and what settings and get everything dialed in. Then you may even have time to enjoy a nice cold beer and play around a bit with some HDR experimentation.

  So- what is set up? As mentioned before, I went with the 24-70mm, the general consensus of advice online was to go with the widest lens available, so that is what I did. It made extra sense in this case because I didn't know how spread out the bursts would be or where exactly they would come from. All I could get beforehand was that they would be in the general direction of the houses shown above in the HDR shot. There seemed to be two main schools of thought regarding how to frame the shots. One was to concentrate on the fireworks themselves, to the exclusion of all else.

 

  This method really focuses on the colors and the patterns. It's artistic, and there is definitely an argument for it. The other school of thought is that it is better to include some sort of foreground elements for context.

   As you can see, I shot a bit of both, but I think I like the images with foreground elements better overall, so I find myself preferring that framing. Plus, it's easier to crop out the foreground and focus on just the burst than it would be to magically insert something in the foreground after the fact. That's it for framing.

  Next up is focus. This is another main advantage of the DSLR over a point and shoot or a phone. Unless you go into menus and disable focus, they will try to focus for each shot which causes delays and missed shots possibly mis-focused images if the AF sensor kept trying to lock on different parts of the expanding burst. Actually, unless you change settings on your DSLR, it will try to do the same thing, the DSLR just generally has a better AF system which means you are more likely to get away with it. Again, there are two ways to address this, and I tried them both. In this case both worked, I really can't say as to whether I have a preference to either. Whichever route you choose, the most important thing is that you need to have a way to disable the autofocus on your camera. You could use a manual only lens, or if your lens lets you, you can switch it from AF to manual focus. It may be a menu choice on your camera. This isn't an issue at all for me, since always shoot using back button focus, vice having my AF tied to the shutter. (if you aren't familiar with back button focus, here is a quick primer- it's a good thing once you are used to it.) Excalibur has a dedicated AF-ON button for both horizontal and vertical shooting.  The D3200 has a programmable AE-Lock button that I keep set up as an AF on. The first method- and most likely the best one of the two, relies on hyperfocal distance.   If this is a new term for you, the basic idea is that for each combination of focal length, camera sensor and aperture, there will be a specific distance at which, if you focus, everything from that distance to infinity will be acceptably sharp. Google away for a way more technical explanation as well as methods to calculate it. I use a simple app on either my phone or iPad. For example, on the D4 at 24mm, F11 (the starting point for my shots, coincidentally, the hyperfocal distance was 5ft8in. So I found something 5ft8in from me, focused on that, then didn't touch the AF-ON button again until I had to. On older manual focus only lenses, you can just set them to infinity and be ok, but AF lenses due to the way they focus, need to be able to go past infinity, so this doesn't work on AF lenses. Later on, as I changed zoom on my lens and changed aperture, either of which changes the hyperfocal distance, I didn't want to take the time to look up the correct distance, find something at that distance to focus on, then reframe my shots. Excalibur has one badass AF system, especially coupled with professional glass,  so once I started changing things, I just adjusted my settings, waited for  a good bust, and triggered the AF-ON button and locked in on the burst, then left it alone until I changed settings again. The disadvantage of this was that obviously I lost some shots because I was using those bursts to set focus, but it was much faster than the hyperfocal method when changing things up mid-stream. The hyperfocal advantage is that you can pre-set and be ready to go a the first burst. But both worked very well. My only focus issues came from me moving the camera since I had to manually trip the shutter and from the environment- boats move in the water during long exposure, and the bursts were moving due to gravity and wind.

  Settings: Based on my research and the advice of other much more experienced pros, I started out with the lowest native ISO on my camera, ISO 100 for Excalibur. It will go down to 50 but that is not native, it's extrapolated. Again, google away to get the way too technical explanations of this, but it's better in general to stick with your sensors native range for whatever you are shooting, low or high ISO. Started at F11, again based on recommendations and research. You want to shoot small apertures to keep the sky and any light pollution dark over the longer exposures, the fire works will provide plenty of light for them, pretty much think of them as flashes with the most insanely high guide numbers ever. I am sure someone has probably worked out firework guide numbers, but if so they had way to much free time.
   Shutter speed: Again, a few schools of thought. You can pick a preset shutter time, depending on your camera, most of the guides I saw recommended anywhere from 3-6 seconds. The main problem with preset shutter speeds is that once you hit the trigger you have no control, you are going to get what you are going to get. So what I did was set my camera to Bulb mode. That way, when I saw the rockets going up I could trip the shutter and hold it open as long as I needed to get the burst. (this is why the remote release is so important, over 13 second exposures that is quite a bit of camera shake from my finger). I started with 2-3 seconds, but I found that that wasn't giving me the length of trails I wanted. The shells were also spaced out far enough that that would only give me a small portion of each burst. I found the images I liked best tended to be around the 10-13 second timeframe. Basically I started the shutter when I saw the first shell burst and ended it whenever I felt like I had enough. I stopped counting seconds pretty quickly into the show. When I noticed I was starting to shoot longer exposures, I bumped the aperture down to F14, but I am not sure that was necessary. It didn't seem to really make much difference.
 
   Ultimately, the nice thing about shooting fire works that pleasantly surprised me, was how easy it was. Really, any combination of small aperture and long shutter speed seemed to work out just fine, it was all a matter of personal preference on what I liked better. Next time I may try to shoot wide open at a higher shutter speed to get some well frozen bursts instead of smooth trails, but I didn't get around to that this time around. Two other things I found in my research that I didn't get the chance to test this time were using a flash at some point in the exposure to define your foreground objects and capturing multiple bursts by leaving the shutter open for very extended timeframes and covering the lens with something between bursts. Again, this was just my first experiment  so there lots left to try.

   Overall, I am pretty happy with how well my first attempt at capturing fireworks turned out. I did play with some of the exposures in post and I also found that I preferred to bump up the saturation and vibrance sliders a few points, but I was shooting raw with no picture controls so your mileage may vary, as well as how you like to cook your images. You can see the full album here and let me know what you like. That was a long and rambling post, so in case you are reading this right before a fireworks show,  here is the cliff notes version:

1- Use the best camera you can get  your hands on.
2- Use a tripod
3- Use a remote release mechanism
4- Go Full Manual mode. ISO, aperture, Shutter speed.
5- Turn off Auto Focus or at least decouple it from the shutter button
6- Pre-focus using hyperfocal distance or focus on a sacrificial burst
7- Start with the lowest native ISO you have available
8- Start with F11-16, set the shutter to bulb mode and trigger manually for 3-15 seconds as a starting point.
9- occasionally check your LCD and adjust your recipe to taste as necessary.

Happy Independence Day!

ps- one final lesson learned- if it's a popular show and you are anywhere near the thick of the crowd, especially if it's a small town with only one main road in or out- maybe bring your computer and start uploading your images right after the show, because unless you parked outside of town, you aren't going anywhere anytime soon. I actually felt like I was back in the Burning Man Exodus line for a bit. Or a snickers commercial.