Fireworks!

travelerb · Jul 8, 2008

My first try at fireworks turned out to be somewhat of a success! It took a little bit of playing around, and realizing that focusing at infinity was not in focus for the fireworks, but I got it fairly quickly. Unfortunately, there wasn't much worthwhile scenery to incorporate into a picture, and the fireworks weren't always that "spectacular," but I'm pretty happy with what I got considering what I had to work with.

Here's one of the better shots:

tirediron · Jul 8, 2008

Very nice.

Computer_Generated · Jul 8, 2008

That's a good shot travelerb. So if you didn't focus @ infinity what did you decide to focus on? Did you just keep turning until they looked okay or did you use the houses below?

travelerb · Jul 8, 2008

Computer_Generated said:
That's a good shot travelerb. So if you didn't focus @ infinity what did you decide to focus on? Did you just keep turning until they looked okay or did you use the houses below?

I had the focus on manual, so I just looked through the viewfinder for a couple of explosions and adjusted the focus until it was pretty close. The buildings also came into focus as well, but I really didn't look at those. I may try to get one of the out-of-focus shots up for comparison. Surprisingly, you can really tell the difference in the fireworks, totally aside from the buildings being out of focus. A little disappointing, since one of them would have been really nice if it were more focused. Probably something that can be fixed a little bit with some PP though.

Everything I had read said to focus at infinity, so I was a little surprised when that wasn't working very well. It was almost dumb luck that I looked through the viewfinder to fix it too. I wasn't far off from infinity, but it made a huge difference. It was also surprising since I wasn't that close to the fireworks. The picture above is actually cropped from a landscape orientation. I later turned the camera to a portrait orientation, and even at 55mm on a D60 (with its cropping), the blasts were almost all inside the frame.

Boz Mon · Jul 8, 2008

You must have been really far away, because I was shooting fireworks here focused to infinity and at 55mm the blasts would not fit in the frame on my D40. Some of them were so big that I was at 18mm. I posted a thread with some of my stuff in the beginners forum and there are 2 of my fireworks shots in there. I mainly focused to infinity and left it there. My aperture was on f/16 and I was shooting on bulb. Seemed to work every time if my timing was ok.

travelerb · Jul 8, 2008

Looking at the satellite view of Google maps, I was 700m-800m away from where they were being launched, which I'd say is a pretty good distance. That's why I can't figure out why infinity looked so out of focus. Maybe it was from shooting at f/8.

travelerb · Jul 9, 2008

As promised, here is one of the out-of-focus pictures from focusing at infinity. This is probably the best of those, so I'm really disappointed it didn't turn out!

Computer_Generated · Jul 9, 2008

Well I dunno man, looks kinda cool to me!

IllegalDamage · Jul 9, 2008

Both are beautiful... Its very hard to capture a solid firework shot but I think you did a pretty decent job =]

travelerb · Jul 10, 2008

A few more...at least until I get around to making some composite shots!:

As always, C&C is very much appreciated! (And thanks for the comments above specifically)

manaheim · Jul 10, 2008

wow these are all really cool and well done. Thanks for sharing and for sharing your experience... the last batch I took were kind of dissapointing so I've been watching these threads with interest.