Travel Tuesday Fireworks in the New York Harbor

This Independence Day my wife and I took a brief trip to New York City for a different view of fireworks. The Fourth of July is her favorite holiday so we try to do something special. This year we took an evening dinner cruise into New York Harbor to watch the festivities. For a photographer this poses a few interesting problems, the main ones being light, and speed. Taking a fireworks picture usually means putting the camera on a tripod and leaving the shutter open for a few seconds (4-20, I usually average about 7) while the explosive soars into the sky and erupts with glorious showers of light and color. Leaving the shutter open for this long captures the entire trajectory of the display. Being on a moving boat made this quite impossible. Seven seconds of picture while floating and turning would create a blurry smudge of color where the firework should have been and streaks of lines from the buildings on Manhattan and the other ships in the water.
My plan was to shoot with as quick a shutter speed as I could while letting a lot of light in quickly with a not too high ISO. The Nikon D4 is a great camera for speed and produces clean images at very high ISO settings, but noise in a black sky would be easily perceptible so decided to go with the fastest glass I had with me. My final setup was using the Sigma 35mm f/1.4 and the D4. Depth of field wasn’t much of a concern since the action was taking place quite a ways away, and was reasonably centered around one focus point. I’m pretty happy with the result.

Nikon D4 Sigma 35mm f/1.4 @ 35mm f/1.8 ISO 2000 1/160 sec

 

Nikon D4 Tokina 16-28mm f/2.8 @ 25mm f/2.8 ISO 2000 1/50 sec

 

Fireworks - How to...

I don’t teach, I have a finite amount of patience (usually measured in milliseconds) and I have the unique ability to only explain things one way, the way I understand them. If someone doesn’t understand something the way I express it, I quickly run out of options. When it comes to taking pictures of fireworks, the internet was boiling over on the photography blogs last week about how to do it correctly. If you want other opinions, there’s plenty out there. Here’s how I did it on Saturday night.

The Fourth of July is my wife’s favorite holiday and we usually spend one of the evenings at her aunt and uncle's home located on the side of a hill in Reading. The reason I mention the hill is because the fireworks display is far enough away so that the aerial show is confined to one location in the sky. If you are seated towards the front of a fireworks display, the performance dominates the entire sky which makes capturing the explosions without an ultra wide lens impossible, also your camera would be shooting almost straight up, so it’s hard to make any adjustments.

A tripod is a necessity, and a remote trigger is helpful. The camera’s shutter will be open for between 3-15 seconds, much longer than any human can hold a camera steady without shaking. This is why there are so many blurry images on Facebook, Twitter, Google plus, etc. of fireworks.

Theoretically, here’s how it works. Since you are taking a picture of a black sky the shutter could stay open in the camera for quite a while as there is little or no light getting in. While the camera is waiting for something to happen in front of it, a firework ascends to the sky and bursts open with marvelous colors streaming through the heavens. Afterwards, you release the shutter, and the camera stops taking a picture. You can leave the shutter open as long as you want, but the longer it's open the noisier things get in the sky. My average was between 4-7 seconds, sometimes quicker during the finale. My camera settings are listed below the image and they never changed throughout the evening, except for shutter speed, which we already covered.

Post processing: In Lightroom make whatever adjustment you would normally when shooting RAW (you do shoot RAW right!) then pay attention to any white clipping. If the highlight warning is lit I use the “whites” slider to correct it. If it’s still clipping I adjust the “highlight” slider down just a fraction until the clipping indicator goes out and then gradually increase the “whites” slider until the warning returns.

One or two tips: Turn off any ISO noise compensation in your camera because you’ll miss pictures waiting for your camera to process images. Better shots happen with less smoke in the air so usually at the beginning of the show. Use the first few explosions to set your focus and then turn off auto focusing. Your depth of field should be fine with apertures 10 and up.

Nikon D800 Tamron 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 70mm f/16 ISO 100 3.6 seconds