Photographing fireworks

1.1.2011 Czechia Reportage

Photographing fireworks is not difficult compared to other photography disciplines, at least not for me. However, in order to master it, several conditions must be met and the appropriate equipment must be available. And since there are many instructions and ideas on the Internet on how to master this discipline, I will only summarize the most basic ones here and refer to the Internet for further and much more detailed information. A tripod is the basis for quality mastering of a good picture. Since he takes pictures for a long time, this tool is absolutely necessary. And when I mentioned time, it is stated and also practically tested that if we want to photograph fireworks in such a way that the picture is worth something, it is necessary to take pictures in manual mode, or in time priority mode. A condition for a high-quality picture is a long time, i.e. a time in the order of a few seconds. Since we are mostly shooting in total darkness (or only with minimal light), the autofocus (AF) of the lens fails completely here. It is therefore necessary to switch to manual focus (MF) and pre-focus manually. One option is to focus at infinity. And the last important factor is the aperture. The larger the aperture number, or using apertures F11-F16, the better. Thanks to the large depth of field with apertures with a high f-number, we get much better results than when using a low f-number. It goes without saying that we use low sensitivity. Likewise, we never use flash in this kind of photography. And what focal point we use depends entirely on us, it is recommended to use wide-angle focal points, as it is more certain that thanks to it we will capture the entire scene, since it is impossible to estimate in advance where exactly the firecracker will "fly" across the sky.