Fireworks photos

[umbrella39]

Hiya, I am very noobish at taking photos at night in low light conditions. I have a Kodak z712IS which has ISO mode.

Long story short, I took my first night fireworks shots last night and when I got home, found that of the 113 shots I took, 111 look like hell and only 2 look good. The 2 that look good were near the end but I didn't do anything different. Just those 2 happened to look OK.

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The one on the left is like 111 of them, the blackness of the night sky looks all clustered and smokey. The one next to it is the one of 2 that the black looks clean.

Any suggestions on how to improve the photos either with the camera or how to 86 the crud in photoshop?

Thanks.

EDIT: OK, I realize now that my ISO was too high and that it caused the noise. So hopefully next time I get my act together. However, if anyone knows a couple of good steps in photoshop to remove the noise, I would be very thankful.

 

[Bowfinger]

The tricky thing with fireworks is auto-exposure can't handle them at all. The fireworks themselves are quite bright, but they're a very small part of the frame. Your auto-exposure wants the frame to be an average gray, so it opens up too much to lighten the black sky.

It's been a while since I shot fireworks, but I think the trick is to use a fairly small aperture with a slow shutter. This lets you capture the color trails without burning out the color through overexposure.

I looked it up to get specific shutter/aperture combinations. If I remember right, I used something like f/8 or even f/16, with a 1/15 or slower shutter (on a tripod, of course). I even did some B shots, where I used a piece of black cardboard to cover the lens between bursts. If the sky is sufficiently dark, you can get nice multiple exposures that way. Pick the right shutter and the fireworks limit their own exposure since they only last a few moments.

Good luck!



Edit: BTW, some great links in this thread.

 

[umbrella39]

Thanks for the tips and the link Bow. I really dropped the ball last night but from my silly litte 2 inch LDC the photos looked like they were turning out great.

 

[Zenmervolt]

Last year I shot fireworks with ISO 50 slide film at f/11 using a remote shutter release and the "bulb" setting. I just guestimated, maybe 3-5 seconds for each exposure. Enough that the fireworks had time to "droop" a little bit, but not long enough for the sky to start turning grey instead of black.

ZV