'Tis the Season for Writing with Light

Wednesday

Jul022014

I've posted about photographing fireworks and sparklers before, but I always seem to do it on the 4th of July or after. Since that's not all that helpful, how about I do that BEFORE the holiday for a change?

Whether you are shooting fireworks high up in the sky, writing words with sparklers, or twirling glow sticks all around, the process is the same. You'll need to shoot in manual so that you can leave your shutter open a long time, raise your aperture a bit, and keep your ISO relatively low.

It's worth the time it takes to get it right.

See? Here are the basic steps:

1. You need to leave the shutter open for a looooooong time, so grab a tripod or find some other sort of stable surface to set the camera on. I've been known to use a chair or the top of the patio table.

2. Unless you have a co-conspirator who can press the shutter button for you, you'll also either need a camera remote or you'll need to use your camera's self-timer for sparklers photos. I generally use the camera's self timer since I never know where my remote happens to be hiding.

3. Since you're going to have that shutter open for a looooooong time, set your ISO low. I set mine at 100 because that seemed to be a good number for making sure I didn't let too much light in. This is how you control how much of the background shows in the photo. I prefer when I can't see any of it, so I go with the lowest number possible.

4. Set the aperture to a high number. That will do two things for you. For one, it'll help make sure you don't let too much light in. Secondly, it will help keep your image in focus.

5. Figure out how long you'll need to leave the shutter open. For sparklers, I figure it out with a little trial and error. I practice writing out my word without using any actual sparklers until I have the camera set just right. For fireworks, you're going to be able to close the shutter much faster. Test a few shots and see where you need to be. That's the joy of digital photography anyway. If at first you don't succeed, delete and try again.

6. For sparklers, if you aren't good at writing backwards, just write forwards and flip the image later. You don't even need Photoshop--even plain old Windows Photo Gallery can flip an image.

That's it. High aperture, low ISO, slow shutter speed. See?

f/32, ISO 400, 6 secondsThat was the first one I took that night. After seeing it, I bumped the ISO down to 100 so that you wouldn't be able to see me in subsequent shots. It worked.