Making your photos of fireworks

These beauties are ephemeral fireworks, but not so complicated to shoot. Must still follow a few simple rules.

Tips :

Stabilize

First board, not least, the shot of hands is avoided. So remember to bring a tripod, mini tripod or any other accessory you can stabilize the unit.

In fact, you should use a long pause on your handset. Thus, by setting your camera securely, you will not be disappointed to discover blurred images. Furthermore, the trails of fireworks are perfectly regular and more aesthetic.

Avoid the Flash

The flash will be of no use to photograph the fireworks. At best, it will illuminate what lies in the foreground, which has the effect of obscuring the background - the sky in this case - and therefore the main subject of your photo.

But your camera does not fail to fall into the trap of its sensors, alerted by a low brightness. Help him a bit and cut him any desire to make the slightest light. Set your flash with forced shutdown. This setting is generally identifiable by an icon representing a flash circled and crossed out.

Close the Diaphragm

First Set your camera to manual mode to be able to act on the shutter speed and aperture.

Contrary to what one might think, it is preferable to close the diaphragm, as if one was taking pictures in daylight. A prolonged opening time will bring enough light to properly expose the image.

Set on a diaphragm aperture value of f: 8 seems quite suitable. If the night is not quite fallen or if the lighting around buildings is not completely off, you can close the aperture to f: 11.

Choose a Slow Shutter Speed

How to get beautiful bright streaks? By leaving the shutter open long enough.

To find the right length, it is desirable to test, since the shutter speed will depend on the focus that made you want to get sky rather dark buildings around not too marked, multiple colors ...

In all cases it must not be less than one second exposure, which can get very pretty bright yarn. If you want to overexpose several explosions in your photo, choose an exposure time of very large (5 or 10 seconds).

Tip: To avoid overexposing your image with ambient light, place a black card in front of the target between each shot rocket. Remove it to capture bursts of color desired.

Reduce Sensitivity

It is night, a logical reaction would be to increase the sensitivity: 800, 1600, 3200 or 6400 ISO. Mistake.

Indeed, the higher the sensitivity, the higher the shutter speed will also be high to avoid over-exposure. This is exactly the reverse was trying to do!

To receive the shots as colored trails and you avoid overexposed shots, low sensitivity is preferable. Adjust your camera so on ISO 100 or ISO 64 if your camera allows. Especially if you want to keep the background image of a brightly lit building.

More sensitivity is reduced over the long shutter can remain open, you can create light effects ...

Make Development to Infinity

ur device will certainly make it difficult to focus automatically. This is normal: the light is missing. And without development, the camera does not photograph. So how?

This is where the manual focus. Even on the compact, there is generated the mode "Manual Focus" or "MF (manual focus in English). Select this mode and adjust the focus on infinity (represented by 8 layers).

Using the Timer

The exposure time is very high, the risk of image blur becomes important. The tripod is of course an essential accessory for that. But simply pressing the trigger can generate a small camera movement resulting in a blurred picture.

To avoid this, follow this simple advice: use the timer to trigger your camera. Two seconds of delay sufficient to ensure that the device is stable at the time of the shooting.

Find an Open Area

Last bit of advice: anticipating the event and just put you at a strategic location to maximize your shots.

No placement is ideal, but some are more conducive to good images. Nothing is more frustrating than not being able to enjoy the full spectacle of electric cables, tree leaves invasive spectators to hair very developed ... These elements should be avoided so as not to spoil the show.