Independence Day comes around once a year and often affords us a three or four day weekend that calls for a mini-vacation.
But the great thing about the Fourth of July holiday is that you don't have to travel to enjoy it. With the price of gas higher than the moon, staying at home is the best choice for a wonderful Independence Day Weekender.
Forget the chores you usually do on weekends and pretend your home is a vacation get-away place. Break out the barbecue equipment, get the hot dogs and burgers ready, set out the lawn chairs, put up the American flag, invite a few neighbors or friends, and have a backyard celebration. Chances are you will be able to enjoy area fireworks displays from right at home. If not, there are plenty of spots that are within easy and inexpensive distance to get to.
You might want to try to get photos of the fireworks. Some people feel it is a daunting task and that special skills are needed. Not so. With a little preparation and the right equipment you might be surprised at your results.
Here are a few tips to help you out. Most of us now use digital cameras, so being able to review your efforts right away is a plus. A digital single lens reflex camera is probably best, but many small point and shoot cameras have a fireworks setting. If you use a point and shoot, do put it on a tripod to make sure your shots are steady. Using the fireworks setting enables you to only have to trip the shutter and the camera will do the work for you. Success varies!
Using a digital single lens reflex camera use the bulb setting which will keep the lens open for a longer period of time than is usual with the other shutter speed settings. In order to do this you have to hold down the shutter button on the camera to keep it open and wait until the fireworks burst ends.
It would seem logical to set the ISO to a higher number since you are photographing in the dark. But fireworks are really bright, so you actually can keep the setting at 100 or 200 and get the best results.
The most important item to use is a tripod. The camera must be steady and not move for these shots. Short of having a tripod, placing the camera on a flat surface with a beanbag underneath it could also work.
Having a remote camera release is definitely helpful, but you can trip the shutter manually and hold it down for the duration of the shot just as long as you do that without moving the camera. Some people use the self-timer on the camera but this is rather tricky since it is difficult to know when each of the fireworks will be shot off.
The trickiest aspect of photographing fireworks is figuring out where to aim the camera, but after a few tries you can usually get set up for where the displays will burst forth in the sky.
The second most difficult thing is focusing. You cannot use the autofocus function of the camera; it will not work in the dark. Change the camera setting to Manual and either establish a focus point near where the fireworks show up or set the focus to Infinity (the farthest distance).
In manual mode you will also manually set your aperture (the lens opening) and this is best at F8 or F16 to obtain good depth of field but still have enough of a lens opening to obtain the shot.
How long should you keep the lens open with the bulb setting? Well, you will have to experiment a bit, but most fireworks bursts last just a few seconds. So by pressing the exposure button at the first second of the blast and counting one one thousand, two one thousand, you should be able to keep the lens open just long enough to expose the shot. Don't make the mistake of holding the bulb setting open too long or you will overexpose the picture. Another trick is to trip the shutter while keeping a dark piece of foam core in front of the lens opening. Then each time a burst appears in the sky, remove the foam core to record the fireworks. In this way you can get more than one fireworks burst on a shot.
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Don't try to keep looking through the viewfinder when taking the picture. Once the camera is properly set up in place and pointed at the right place in the sky and focused, you should be able to watch for the fireworks burst directly without peering through the camera viewfinder. If your camera has live view you could switch to that and see how things are going.
If you have an automatic flash on the camera, be sure to switch it off.
You can use either wide angle or telephoto lenses. Wide angle will give you more of the sky scene whereas the telephoto will show mostly the fireworks bursts. A zoom lens that goes from wide to telephoto is useful.
You can try both horizontal and vertical shots. Zoomed-in shots seem best at horizontal and vertical shots show off the downward motion of the fireworks.
Remember to check your display every now and then to make sure you are getting the results you want. No matter how your shots turn out, in this digital age you waste no expense trying for fireworks photos and you should have a lot of fun trying this.
Happy Independence Day and have a glorious Fourth!
