How to Photograph Fireworks {Tips Roundup}

Happy 4th! All those liv­ing here in the fab­u­lous USA will undoubt­edly by see­ing some sort of fire­works today and pos­si­bly even through­out the week. And, if you’re into pho­tog­ra­phy like I am, then you want to be able to cap­ture some of those awe­some fire­works. Since get­ting my DSLR cam­era about 18 months ago (and then learn­ing to use it & shoot in full man­ual mode), I’ve been able to have a few oppor­tu­ni­ties for fire­works pho­tog­ra­phy prac­tice. Dis­ney­land fire­works are always amaz­ing and I’ve loved try­ing to cap­ture a few good shots from them. Here are a cou­ple of favorites:

Then, last 4th of July, we were at a fam­ily reunion. There was no big fire­works show to shoot, but instead small fire­works in the dri­ve­way. It was my first chance to attempt play­ing with pho­tograph­ing sparklers. Once I got my set­tings right, the kids kept exper­i­ment­ing with dif­fer­ent motions and things to see what kinds of shots we would get.

Pretty cool, huh?! They’re by no means “pro”, but are WAY bet­ter than any fire­works shots I was get­ting a few years ago. With all my prac­tic­ing & read­ing, I’ve learned a few things. First up, to get shots like this (and bet­ter) you need to shoot in man­ual. And, you def­i­nitely want to turn off the flash. While it may seem counter-intuitive for night shots, you actu­ally want a really low ISO set­ting (all of these were shot at either 100 or 200) and a long shut­ter speed. You’ll def­i­nitely just need to play around with your set­tings a bit until you find some­thing that’s work­ing well. For best results (and I’ve never done this, which is per­haps why my shots aren’t as good as they could be), you need to use a tri­pod.

So, those are a few of the basics I’ve learned, but there are some GREAT posts out there (from the “pros”) with lots of details and some fab­u­lous fire­works pho­tos. Here’s a roundup of a few favorites:

• How to Shoot Fire­works from My 3 Boybarians
• Shoot­ing Fire­works Tips (Video) from Kent Weakley
• How to Cre­ate Sparkler Pho­tos from Stu­dio Jewel
• Fire­works Pho­tog­ra­phy Tuto­r­ial from Sew, Click, Create

*UPDATE*: We ended up going to a fire­works show last night. We had a bad angle (with a power pole in the way) and I com­pletely for­got to bring the tri­pod. UGH! I so wanted to prac­tice with it. So, these are the best I got with­out the tri­pod! Still WAY bet­ter than ever before. Now, I’m hope­ful that next time, with a tri­pod, I’ll really be able to snag some awe­some shots!

Have YOU had any luck pho­tograph­ing fireworks?

Linked to: *Tater­tots & Jello