If you are interested in photographing a fireworks display, this tutorial will help guide you on what equipment, setup, and post processing is required to capture the magic of a fireworks show.
We need to translate how we, as humans, experience the firework explosion to how the camera sees the explosion. We hear the explosive launch, see the trail of the rocket fire into the night sky, followed by a larger explosion of light as the firework blooms into a glittering flower of colors across the sky fading back into the darkness. It is an event that takes place both over time and space. While it is quick it is not instantaneous.
Now let us break it down based on how the camera sees this event and how we can compensate to recreate it as best we can to capture the human experience.
1) Fireworks are shot at night. This is a low light environment, so the camera needs to have a sensor capable of taking photos well in the dark. It also requires a fast lens. I recommend an aperture of at least f2.8. For these photos I used my Sony a7RII and my 35 mm Sony Zeiss f2.8 lens.
2) Fireworks are not instant events; they take place over time. Since we are shooting a photo, not video, we must compensate for this by taking long exposure shots. This will allow collection of light from the rocket launch through the firework explosion. I learned through astrophotography where I was capturing fireworks by accident that ten seconds was acceptable in those shots. For these photos I had to reduce the exposure to five seconds. Ten seconds was too long, and two seconds was too short. You may need to adjust exposure based on weather conditions and the length of time the fireworks stay lit in the sky.
3) Fireworks are bright and colorful, and they explode in three dimensions. The sudden bright light can easily overwhelm camera sensors and throw off the auto focus. You will need to shoot in manual focus. Combined with the requirements above you will need a tripod and stable ground to shoot on. You will not be able to shoot from a boat or other unstable surface. Manual focus should be set at or near infinity. Which means you will need to be far enough away from the fireworks such that they are entirely in focus at the required aperture of your lens at infinity. The distance away will determine the focal length of the lens you need. I was about 2 miles away, you do not need to be that far away, but I was across the lake and could not get any closer. I would have used a telephoto lens if I had a f2.8 telephoto, but my 35 mm was my only option at the time, so my images are cropped. This is also an option when shooting on the high image resolution Sony a7RII. Shoot photos in RAW format so color corrections can easily be made in post processing. Since the fireworks are bright if there are too many at once they may wash out or look white. Therefore, the exposure or aperture might need to be reduced if this is the case. For example, any time the ground display was set off on the barge those shots did not turn out well it was too much light but two to three fireworks in the sky was fine.
4) Fireworks are random events. By the time you hear the launch it is too lake to take the photo. You need a show that is constantly firing fireworks. There is a town I know, I will not name, which is known to take several minutes between firework launches. If you are trying to shoot such a display it is not worth your time, effort, or frustration. To successfully capture photos of fireworks, they must regularly launch several times a minute. To take photos you need to do two things. Use either a remote trigger or set a delay of five seconds from pressing the shutter release. This is to prevent bumping or vibrating the camera when the shutter is open and taking the shot. Second, keep taking photos throughout the show. do not wait for the sound of a launch. Use your first few shots to confirm proper framing and locking of the manual focus. After that is correct, keep shooting. Some shots will work out, some will be a bust. Do not worry if you captured a certain firework or not because you are trying capture whatever you can capture not capture a particular photo. To do so is impossible because you do not know what the firework will look like until it explodes, and you do not know when it will launch and how long it will take to explode after launch to figure out when you needed to click your shutter button based on your exposure time. That is all ridiculous, so do not worry about it. Enjoy the show and keep clicking. Then be surprised about what you did capture afterwards.
Summary of Tips for Shooting Fireworks
- Camera with low light performance (high resolution if you are going to crop) that can capture RAW images
- Lens with aperture f2.8 or better, focal length based on distance from fireworks unless cropping then you can use a wider lens
- Tripod
- Location far enough so fireworks are at infinity a f2.8 or better with lens used, must be stable unmoving surface
- Shoot manual focus, long exposure (try 5 seconds adjust as needed)
- Use delayed shutter release or remote shutter
The last step is to process your images. I process my images in Adobe Lightroom. You can use another image processing program if you prefer.
I use Lightroom because I have not found another program that has a dehaze function like Lightroom which I use in my astrophotography. I set dehaze to +25 because there is smoke and haze from the fireworks and that helps reduce the effect. The other settings will differ for your photos, but these are the corrections I used on mine. For Contrast +5, Highlights -70, Shadows +45, Whites +10, Blacks -20, Vibrance +15, Saturation +5. My overall goal is to correct for what the camera sees versus what we saw. It was night so the sky was black not dusk like in the unedited version. It is lighter there because the camera collected five seconds of light. The camera can see that light, we cannot. In editing I darken the sky back down but keep the fireworks vibrant without color shifting or blowing out the bright highlights.
Lightroom also has new masking filters now available that can isolate the sky and subject and has presets using those filters. In this case I found using the “Dark Drama” and “Pop” presets worked well to separate sky and fireworks without adjusting the colors.
Your camera interprets color based on the color temperature of the light it thinks it sees and tint. That influences all the colors in the photograph. If your camera misinterprets that information the colors in the photo can be off. This can easily be corrected if shooting in RAW with the photo editor. I did not have to make any adjustments but that does not mean you will not. Since the primary light source is a firework, it would not be unexpected for the light temperature or tint to be off.
I apply all lens corrections.
Finally crop the shots to the same size. Since these are taken from the same location on the same tripod, I could easily crop one photo and then copy the crop in Lightroom from the first photo to the remining photos. You might not need to crop if you use a suitable lens focal length.
For the 4th of July Fireworks on Green Lake, Wisconsin, I took 49 photos and ended up with 14 keepers. Here are the remaining final shots from the fireworks over Blackbird Point in 2022.
