Hello, my name is Dabashish Talakta, and I've put this short video together to share with
you how I make pictures of fireworks.
I've been shooting fireworks for several years now, and I've learned a thing or two
after a lot of trial and error.
So hopefully what I'm about to share with you over the next few minutes will be useful
the next time there's a fireworks display in town, and you have it head out there with
me.
Let's start off with some of the basics of things that you need to be able to get good
pictures of fireworks.
You need a camera where you can manually set the focus, the ISO, and the exposure time.
Now most digital SLRs will allow you to do this, as well as most compact Micro Four
Thirds systems.
Some advanced point-of-shoot cameras will also allow you to do that.
As a general rule, stick with a digital SLR or a Micro Four Thirds system.
You're going to need a means to keep the camera nice and stable, which means that you need
a good tripod.
If you don't have a tripod, don't fret, you can improvise by using something like a beanbag
or even a sock filled with rice.
The third thing that you're going to need is a means to fire the camera remotely.
Now what this does is it prevents any vibrations from being apart of the camera even accidentally
when you're triggering the camera by hand.
Now this might mean a couple of different things.
You could use a cable release, which is a handheld unit that will allow you to shoot without
touching the camera body itself and it's connected via cable in the body of the camera.
The alternative is to use an infrared remote.
Now why is it just to be invisible light?
The third thing, which is my two of preference, is if you've got a means that's inbuilt into
the software of the camera to trigger the camera off at regular intervals.
Now, I use a Canon 5D Mark II with a custom firmware called Magic Lantern.
It has a built-in intervalometer.
What this allows me to do is it allows me to tell the camera to fire off shots at regular
intervals, say every 10 or 15 seconds.
So now that we've got our gear all sorted, let's talk about some of the key considerations
that you need to think about when you're about to set up for a firework shoot.
The first thing that comes to mind is what do you focus at?
Well, a firework's display is nothing more than a landscape shot with a primary subject
at a very, very far distance, which we're going to call infinity, and in low-light conditions.
So in order to make the most of this, what I do is I set my camera lens to focus on manual focus.
I set it to infinity.
Now what this does is it takes advantage of what's called the lens's hyper-vocal distance.
The theory behind this is that beyond a certain distance, everything that's in the scene is going to remain
at an acceptable level of focus.
That distance is called the hyper-vocal distance of the lens, and for most lenses, it's a few meters.
Given the firework's display is going to be far off, once you set it to infinity,
anything that's far off is always going to remain in focus.
The second thing that you need to consider, and it's perhaps the most important,
is the exposure time.
This requires a little bit of trial and error, and in my experience, I find that firework's displays
are best photographed at exposure times of somewhere between 4 and 12 seconds.
There is a hard and fast rule, and sometimes it takes a little bit of experimenting to get it right,
but a good place to start is 8 seconds, and then work your way backwards from there.
The third thing to consider is how do you compensate for shooting in low-light conditions?
Even though you're going to have the shutter open for an average of, say, 8 seconds,
it might not be enough to capture enough detail, and this is where the ISO of the camera comes into play.
You're going to be limited by what the sensitivity of your camera is as you crank up the ISO,
because in certain cameras, the higher the ISO goes up, the grainier the image becomes.
With the Canon 5D Mark II, this camera does exceptionally well at high ISOs,
but a good place to start from is ISO 800, and if you discover that your images turn out to be really, really grainy,
crank the ISO down to a point where you get pictures that are of an acceptable level of clarity.
So those are the initial settings that I take on board before setting up.
In this next segment, I'm going to show you how I went about shooting a fireworks display in July 2013 here in Melbourne.
When I first got to the site where the fireworks were going to go off, I wasn't quite sure what settings to go with.
I realised I had to experiment, so I started off by setting the camera at f8 with an ISO of 800 for a 4-second exposure.
I fired off a couple of test shots with the intention of ascertaining at what aperture I would get a properly exposed image
for an ISO of 800 at a 4-second exposure.
I discovered that I was right on the money at f8.
Now, since I was shooting a 4-second exposure, I set the intervalometer of my camera to shoot an exposure every 5 seconds.
Now, for a 4-second exposure at ISO 800, f8 would give me a properly exposed image with the absence of fireworks.
The moment fireworks went off, I knew that light levels were going to go up,
which meant that I had to increase the f number or close the aperture to control the amount of light that came into the lens.
So what I did is that I cranked up the f number from f8 to f13,
which should have compensated sufficiently to give me the correct exposure.
In hindsight, I might have gone to f16, maybe even f18, to get a slightly less exposed image,
but f13 seems to have worked pretty well.
At this stage, I was comfortable with the settings that I had on my camera.
It was just a matter of waiting for the fireworks display to start.
Once the fireworks started, I activated the intervalometer.
The camera began to shoot 4-second exposures every 5 seconds.
I let the camera continue doing its thing for the entire duration of the fireworks display.
This particular display lasted for about 25 minutes, so I came away with a very large number of exposures.
At the end of the fireworks display came the moment of truth.
I went back and looked at the images that the camera had captured.
It hadn't done too badly, and I was really, really excited to see what these images would look like on the big screen.
The next step involved coming back home and putting them through my post-processing workflow in Lightroom and Photoshop.
So that's how I went about shooting that fireworks display back in July 2013 here in Melbourne.
If you've used these guidelines and gone out and shot, you should have captured some pretty decent images straight out of camera.
Images that are more than possible, perhaps very high quality.
If you really want to bring the life out of these images, you can do a lot of magic in post-processing.
I use Lightroom and Photoshop to finish off my images.
So I'm going to show you what I did to the images that I captured,
and how I went about going from straight out of camera to a finished image.
So here we are in Lightroom.
I've got four images of fireworks displays that I photographed at different periods of time.
I'm going to use this one to demonstrate how I go about editing images in Lightroom and Photoshop that are fireworks.
When I open the image up, I can see what the metadata for the image was.
Shot at f13 with a four second exposure at ISO 800.
To make any changes, I'm going to hit the develop module and I'm going to start off with basic lens corrections.
I'm going to enable lens profile corrections.
I'm going to tell the system to automatically remove any chromatic aberration and constrain the crop.
I'm then going to flip across to the manual adjustments where I'm going to rotate the image to ensure that the horizon line is indeed horizontal.
This is nothing out of the ordinary. I do this for all my landscape images.
So here I am at a stage where the horizon line is horizontal and I've got an image that's straight out of camera.
If you look across the left where I've got presets, you'll see that I've got a set of presets called fireworksset1bydoubleconvex.com.
This is a set of custom presets that I had created to make sure that I didn't have to keep on reinventing the wheel every time I had a set of fireworks images.
I'm giving this away for free for a limited time. Let me show you what these do.
With a single click, I can edit the tone and color of a fireworks image without playing with all the sliders.
I can choose what appeals to me most aesthetically.
I used to be a chemistry major, so I'm familiar with what the different metals impart in terms of color and tone to flames.
That's why I named them accordingly.
Play around with them and you'll find out which ones appeal to you the most.
You might use one set for a particular display and one set for something different.
For this particular one, I'm going to use the Rebedium setting.
At this stage, if you zoom in, you'll see that there's a favorite noise in the image.
We can clean that up in Photoshop.
I'm going to go ahead and right click and I'm going to edit in Photoshop CS6.
This will open up the image in Photoshop where once it loads up, I'm going to launch a plugin.
It's one of my favorites. It's called Noiseware from Image Nomics.
What this will do is that it will allow me to apply a filter that will take out the noise without really losing clarity.
Now, Noiseware has a whole heap of different presets, but given that this is a Fireworks display shot at night, I'm going to use the Night Scene preset.
Once you've applied this, if you click and release the click on your mouse, you'll be able to toggle between the before and after noise and noise removed image.
I'm going to apply that setting and hit OK. Once that's been applied, you should see a fair bit difference in the image itself.
That's how easy it is to edit an image of this nature.
I'm going to go ahead and hit Save and exit out of this.
I'm going to go back into Lightroom where you'll see that a TIF has been created.
You'll see the difference between the two images right there.
It's just as easy to edit any other image. Let's use one of the other ones.
This one, for example, is a much older one. I'll use the same thing in Develop.
Make it Lens Corrections.
Just straighten the horizon so that it remains completely horizontal.
In this case, because the buildings are leading in, I might apply a little bit of perspective correction.
Just to make sure that the verticals are also vertical.
Once this is done, I've got a choice of different presets that I can use.
Say I use the one called Wolfram, which is a tungsten effect. It gives it a nice blue tinge.
Or I could even go for a magnesium effect, which is going to give it a bit of a yellow and green tinge.
I actually think the Cobalt one might look pretty good on this too.
So you've got a couple of different choices to work with.
Once you're done with this, just go ahead and edit in Photoshop, launch NoiseWare, and take the noise at.
That's how simple it is.
Launch NoiseWare there, and we're all done.
So there you go. Now you know how I go about making pictures of fireworks.
I hope you found that useful, and if you did, feel free to leave me a comment in the comment section below.
And please, do share this with your friends and family on your social networks.
I hope you enjoyed this. Until next time, thanks for watching. I'm Devachesh.
I'll see you soon.
