New age Fireworks
By vasanth vs
17 August 2007
Capturing fireworks can be a great experience. It is one of those scenarios that help understand the complexities involved in low light photography. Understanding the exposure triangle (Fstop, Shutter speed, ISO) and making the right trade off's become more significant in these situations.
Recently I tried to apply a counter intuitive method to capture fireworks. The traditional way to do it is to set up a tripod and open the shutter for a long time. This is the most conservative and intuitive way of doing it. The method I used on July 4th 2007 was a little different
The setup is as follows:
1. Select the manual mode and set your aperture to the largest possible dimension( I mean, smallest Fstop – say F2.8)
2. Set the ISO to the max limit – something around 1600 or 2000 would be the best. This is the tricky part for most of us as noise would kick in at these extreme values. Noise doesn't matter a lot in this case, as you will find out in the next few steps.
3. The most important alteration from the traditional method is to set your shutter speed as if you were capturing a car traveling at 20-30mph....i.e 1/30-1/50secs (you may need to experiment a bit here, I used 1/80secs). The bottom line here is not to set a slow shutter speed. Do the opposite - freeze the streaks in the fireworks to make them appear sharp.
4. Increase the saturation, contrast and sharpness settings in your camera by one notch (if you have these features)
5. Try to pick only the fireworks that reach a shorter height and move as close as possible.
6. Start Clicking .......try to vary the shutter speed - from 1/20 to even 1/80secs. As you may have noticed by now, I have not talked about a tripod. With the shutter speed as high as the one I have mentioned above, you don't need a tripod – don't forget the rule of thumb about the focal length being less than the denominator in your shutter speed to avoid any blur caused by camera shake
7. The only post processing step we are going to do, is to INVERT the image. Now this is where you will realize that noise caused by the high ISO setting will blend in with the image. After all we want the final image to look like a blast of colors. You may use curves to clean up the white background. This is usually not required as the night sky is as black as you can get and the inversion will produce a pure white backgound.
Sometimes, not having the right gear (in this case, I did not have a tripod) can result in something that is innovative. Alright then, start shooting now!!
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