Fireworks

Nikon D7000, 10mm, f/10, shutter 5 sec., ISO 200

I took this photo last week during the annual Fourth of July fireworks festivities. It has several things to teach us.

First, fireworks need to be facing up when you light them. We got three launchers lit at once, and you can see two of the three performing as designed in the middle of the photo. Unfortunately, the third one ended up sideways, spinning itself around as it shot flaming, exploding balls all over the neighborhood. You can see the light trail left by one that’s going off just out of the shot on in the lower right. In the middle right you can see one flaming under a truck in the driveway across the street. In the middle left you can see a big one in the street. And at the far left you can see one detonating in the bushes. That last one is also a lesson in the importance of raking the dead leaves out of your hedges, as it started a brush fire that took a few minutes to put out.

In the photography realm, the key teaching point is the importance of being in the right place at the right time with your camera ready. If my camera had been in a bag in the house, I wouldn’t have gotten the shot. Even if I’d been a little earlier or a little later with the shutter, the picture wouldn’t have documented the event as completely.

At least to an extent, photos like this are a matter of luck. But we can influence our luck greatly by taking steps to improve our odds. In class I nag students constantly about keeping their cameras with them at all times and getting into the habit of taking a ton of photos. Moments like this are the payoff for the practice.

You can also see some technical elements at work here. Normally shooting in extremely dim light with a low ISO would produce a big, black square. But the light from fireworks produces a strong lighting source. In this example, the loose pyrotechnics are sort of like having someone running around the shot firing a strong flash left and right. Because fireworks were the target of the shoot, I locked the camera down on a tripod and set the shutter for five seconds. This extremely slow shutter speed also allowed me to catch some more standard shots of explosions that went off in the sky like they were supposed to.

And for the more advanced photographer, I also followed some advice from Nikon’s newsletter and turned on the long exposure noise reduction setting.

Nikon D7000, 10mm, f/10, shutter 5 sec., ISO 200