Fireworks!

I just love to shoot fireworks! When it's a nice long show, and you have a good view of the sky, everything can click and you just get some really nice shots. All of that happened Friday night at the Sun-N-Fun, and I got these great shots of the fire in the sky.

I think I've found that the trick to getting good shots of fireworks is to stop your lens down tight. I think some of these were shot as small as F18 or even F22. That lets only the brightest light leave an image on the image sensor, and that doesn't let the light collect and tend towards white. I think it lets me get more color in the shots. Your mileage may vary.

A hard part of shooting a big show like this is getting just a single burst (or two) in the shot. There's a lot of stuff going on at one time in the sky, and trying to capture too much of that just leads to a muddy mess of white light. I took progressively shorter and shorter shots, with 2-2.5 seconds being about the sweet spot. You get one, maybe two bursts in the frame, and all the colors are still good.

Sometimes still photography can't do an effect justice. These blue streamers were shooting out in a circle, looking for all the world like a giant version of the old Rainbird lawn sprinklers, only with light instead of water. To a camera with a lens open for 2.5 seconds, it's all the same.