Memos From The Digital Darkroom

In all of the years I’ve been into photography, I’ve never tried shooting fireworks. It’s something I’ve been interested in, but  never got around to doing. This year I decided to change that by making a point to go downtown and shoot the fireworks show that launched the 2009 Portland Rose Festival.

When I arrived at the river thirty minutes before the show, I found that that the fireworks had been moved downriver a short way. This meant that I wouldn’t be able to shoot from the Hawthorne Bridge as I had planned to. In fact, the police would not allow any pedestrian traffic on the north side of the bridge. This was most likely because strong winds were later blowing fireworks debris toward the bridge from the barge in the middle of the river that was used as a launching platform. I had to find a spot amongst the large crowd that had already assembled along the river’s east side Esplanade walkway.

I had read the theory of shooting fireworks countless times: Use a tripod, choose a low ISO (I experimented with 100 and 200), use bulb setting with a remote shutter release, turn off auto focus and image stabilization, shoot in manual mode, and use a medium to large aperture number. Now it was time to put this knowledge to the test.

I aimed my camera high and zoomed in a bit with the goal of capturing individual and small groups of fireworks as they burst. However, I kept my framing loose enough to still capture a wide range of bursts because it was impossible to predict exactly where they would occur. I tried to time my shutter release so that the shutter would be open before the shells exploded. I did this by clicking the shutter as soon as I saw the shells launch from the barge. Naturally, this took a bit of trial-and-error. Thanks goodness, though, for the immediacy of digital. After I found the right area to train my camera on, I experimented with exposure times and aperture. I found that times of 2-4 seconds and an aperture of about f/9 yielded the best results. The photo above was shot at 3 seconds at f/9. The photo to the left was shot at 4 seconds at f/7.1.

One of the tricks to shooting fireworks is isolating individual bursts, before subsequent bursts obscure the shot. In the photo to the left you can see that two more shells were just bursting when I closed the shutter. If I had waited a second longer, I would have gotten a much different result that I don’t think I would have liked as much.

Overall, I’m quite happy with the results of my first foray into photographing fireworks. If you’d like to see more of the results, click here, or click on the Fireworks gallery from the Photo Galleries link to the right. All of these photos were processed in Lightroom’s Develop module with very minimal spot removal and uploaded directly from Lightroom’s Web module.

Something I learned from shooting fireworks is to expect the unexptected. Even with the live viewing and instant feedback of digital, it’s hard to predict the exact outcome. It felt a bit more like the old days of shooting film, except that I was able to make about 200 exposures during the 30 minute show - something I’ve never considered with film.

If you’ve ever thought about shooting fireworks, I encourage you to give it a try. There are lots of websites with tips that will help you work out the technical details. Here’s a link to one that covers most of the basics. If you take the time now to review tips and experiment with them, you’ll be ready for the next fireworks display in your area. In Portland, the next big show will be on the Fourth of July. You can bet I’ll be there building on the expereince I got from shooting the Rose Festival fireworks show.