carlo obillos photography

It isn't the easiest thing to get a nice shot of fireworks, but there are a couple of tricks I used tonight, for Canada day:

Try to get some other things in the frame. Giving the viewer some context lends the image a lot more impact. Since fireworks happen at night, you'll almost certainly need a tripod and a slow shutter speed.

I set my camera on manual, with a long shutter speed (20 seconds, maybe), and an aperture that a)gave decent depth of field and b)yielded an appropriate (darkish) overall exposure.

In these shots, I held a black card (alright, it was my son's blankie) in front of the lens, and only took it away when the blast had spread itself out nicely. If you let the whole blast show, you'll end up with an indistinct, blurry mess instead of a defined, colourful trails.


Try to get the early pops. Each explosion leaves some smoke behind, and this shows up in images taken later on. Wind can help alleviate this problem.

Photographing fireworks