As the year rapidly comes to a close, it’s time to celebrate the year that has been in anticipation of our hopes and dreams for the New Year. Many people around the world celebrate this time of year with a variety of ceremonies and gatherings.
One of the more popular New Years’ celebrations almost always includes a hefty fireworks display. For many, viewing fireworks is family activity that inspires contemplation about the previous year and encourages a vision for the year to come.
If your family is planning on attending a fireworks display at some point during this holiday season, you might think about how you’ll capture the moment with your photography skills. Here are a few tips designed to help you capture fireworks this year:
Use The Right Equipment
When it comes to capturing fireworks, the right equipment means everything. You must keep your camera steady, which means you must have a sturdy tripod and a remote to fire the camera. Because long exposures tend to use more battery, it never hurts to bring a backup battery along.
Use a Low ISO
When you’re capturing fireworks you want to use a low ISO setting, such as 100 or 200. There are a few reasons why this is recommended. First, a higher ISO means introducing more noise into your images, which you want to prevent if you’re capturing fireworks. Second, this noise lives in the blue areas of your images and nighttime usually has a lot of blue that can compound the issue. Long exposures also increase the amount of noise in your photos, so you must keep your ISO low in order to eliminate that variable.
Avoid Using Live View
If your camera has a live view, it can be easy to become quite reliant on that function. However, this usually eats up your battery exceptionally fast, which becomes a bigger problem when shooting long exposures that require additional battery life. It makes sense to use the eyecup viewfinder to retain battery life for actual shooting.
Use Manual Mode
When it comes to setting an exposure, you want to utilize manual mode as much as possible. You should also set your aperture to either f5.6 or f8. These apertures are ideal for fireworks because the light streaks you’re trying to capture can be controlled by the size of the aperture. Closing down your aperture will make the light trails thinner, while opening up will make them wider, but possible over exposed.
Set Shutter Speed Appropriately
For fireworks photos, the ideal shutter speed can range anywhere between two and ten seconds. You can utilize a test shot before the display begins to see if the sky is too dark or too bright and, therefore, adjust the exposure time accordingly.
There are many small details that go into capturing fireworks photos successfully. These tips are just a few that will help you capture the night sky in all its’ splendor this New Years’ Eve. For more tips on how to effectively capture fireworks displays, please check out this link.