With the Fourth of July being tomorrow, I though I would share how I photograph fireworks. It's relatively easy as long as you have a few essentials.
First, you obviously need a camera, but you also need to be able to access the manual settings on the camera itself. Some point and shoot cameras will let you do this as well.
Secondly, you need a tripod since you will be probably be shooting for at least 4 or 5 seconds.
Whatever lens(es) you have will work. But if you have more than one, you have some options as far as what you want them to look like. I shot the photo below with a telephoto lens. All you get is the firework itself, nothing else.
In this photo, I used a wide lens and got a silhouette of some of the trees in the shot.
Basically when you shoot fireworks, you want to have a long enough exposure to capture the trails of light. I usually start with my camera set up like this: Aperture- f11, Shutter speed- 4 seconds, ISO- 200. Then I vary up my shutter speeds to get different looks and combinations of fireworks. If you have a 10 second or so shutter speed you can get more than one firework in the same frame.
If you start there, you can adjust depending on what look you're going for. I used a 20 second exposure for the above photo. Be careful not to go too long or it could look messy like the one below.
For the finale, you need to use shorter shutter speeds so the photo doesn't become a big ball of light. This one was only 4 seconds and it was too long.
Anyways, if you're still reading by now, you must be interested so I hope this was a help.
