first time at fireworks

[Ernicus]

I was practicing on the moon tonight and people started popping fireworks. So I hit the trigger and swung over (man I love this head on my tripod...lol), and tried to catch some. Only 3 more popped off, so this is what I got. Ok I guess for 1st time. Need to find focus better and apparently faster.

Didn't really bother editing as they were spur of the moment. I could go in and adjust to remove the speckles and power lines that showed in one of them, maybe later.

 

[dxqcanada]

Just manually focus at infinity.
Aperture changes how thick the lines appear.

 

[Robin Usagani]

Once you get bored, do a long shutter and change the focus and zoom during exposure. Check out this video I did just to mess around. I didnt change the focal length though.

[video]https://vimeo.com/25995070[/video]

 

[Ernicus]

Cool info guys, thanks.

 

[Ernicus]

Pretty cool vid. Nice idea.

 

[Robin Usagani]

Just manually focus at infinity.
Aperture changes how thick the lines appear.

Really? The thickness of the lines is controlled mostly how much they are out of focus. It will be thicker if they are out of focus. If they are in focus, the aperture wont affect it IMO.

 

[Ernicus]

What I did was I just set focus to where I thought it would be, had it in bulb mode, and once the initial shot went shooting up, I held shutter until the last glow was gone. And that's what I got. lol. No idea what to do, so that made sense to me at the time.

 

[Robin Usagani]

What I did was I just set focus to where I thought it would be, had it in bulb mode, and once the initial shot went shooting up, I held shutter until the last glow was gone. And that's what I got. lol. No idea what to do, so that made sense to me at the time.

You did it right. Just focus manually to infinity and then turn it back a tad. Or what I typically do is use live view and just manually focus it looking at the screen.

 

[Ernicus]

Ok, cool. If they had popped more, I was going to try to catch one to focus on. I had initially put to infinity, then pulled back...but I think I pulled back not enough as they were not that far away, kinda like 3 blocks maybe.

I'll definitely revisit this obviously on the 4th. lol.