Ka-Boom

Fourth of July always presents a technical photo opportunity, photographing fireworks. I have to admit after a couple of years I have the formula down pretty good. A low ISO setting, the right f-stop and fireworks are easy. It is a matter of locking down the camera angle and right shutter duration on bulb. The longer the duration more fireworks on each image. Now the finale, that is something I struggle with.

The finale lasts just a few seconds and I never seem to get it right. For years I have tried to capture it and only been rewarded with overexposed streaks of light. I tried bulb, aperture preferred metering, program setting, nothing ever worked right. I decided this year to just try a manual exposure with a fairly high exposure setting. Worse comes to worse I would just fall back on the pyrotechnics during the show for my pictures.

As it turns out, my finale pictures were not too bad. A little on the dark side but I could bring out the details in Photoshop CC, much easier than having an overexposed image and trying to force detail into a blown-out highlight. And next year I’ll have a good starting point on exposure to fine tune my finale exposures. It just sucks I have to wait a year to try it.