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Posted 2014-08-22
Tonight is the third night of the Scheveningen International Fireworks Festival! Hopefully the rain will be done by then. Photographing fireworks remains tricky business, though.
Last week, I used my trusty Nikon D7100 with the 18-55 mm kit lens. The zoom range is fairly suitable here, and it has image stabilization, so I was able to get reasonably sharp photos at 1/8th of a second hand-held. However, they're not quite as sharp as I hoped, so maybe if the weather is good tonight I'm going to take a tripod, so I can use even longer shutter times to get more of the streaming effect.
It could be that a lot of the movement in the fireworks in caused by the wind blowing the fireworks away, though. A tripod isn't going to help against that.
I set up the camera for "back button focus", so I had more control over the autofocus. Back button focus means programming the AE-L/AF-L button for "AF-ON". With this setting, pressing the shutter doesn't make autofocus happen, you need to press the AE-L/AF-L button for that. This way, there's no autofocus delay when shooting, which is useful with fireworks, because the autofocus system can't always get a good focus lock on it. But with cheap zoom lenses it's important to refocus after zooming, because the focus drifts when zooming. A quick press of the AE-L/AF-L button while pointing the camera at a distant light takes care of that.
I set the aperture and shutter speed manually, but used auto ISO so the camera would adjust the ISO to match the brightness of the fireworks. I experimented with -0.7 to -2 exposure compensation, and -1.3 seemed to work the best.