Australia Day Fireworks (Melbourne)

I'm quite a devoted 'fireworks hunter'.. two years ago in my hometown there was fireworks season, where they'd light up every evening at midnight and guess who would be there, tripod and all. No different though I may be far from home. I'm quite impressed by the quality and quantity of fireworks here.. great show!

The shoot had some technical problems though.. namely they lit up the main bursts 90 degrees to my right (which nobody, not even those who were here last year, expected). Sure I have a ballhead with dedicated panning base.. but there was a small problem of this huge tree right in my line of fire. Now that really sucked

Either way I still had something to show for it.. we do what we can.

Lightstream wrote in post #2602816
I'm quite a devoted 'fireworks hunter'..

Nice shots lightstream!

Since you're a fireworks hunter, you might be interested in spending 2 weeks in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia in August. There's going to be a "Malaysia International Fireworks Competition" from 15th till 30th August in Putrajaya. Here's a link:
http://202.157.188.226​/consumer/events/defau​lt.asp
(search by month & go for August)

Let me know if you need more info or links.

btw, we're having fireworks in Kuala Lumpur every day for the entire month of January - yup every day! It lasts about 20-30 minutes each.

kckong wrote in post #2602870
Nice shots lightstream!

Since you're a fireworks hunter, you might be interested in spending 2 weeks in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia in August. There's going to be a "Malaysia International Fireworks Competition" from 15th till 30th August in Putrajaya. Here's a link:
http://202.157.188.226​/consumer/events/defau​lt.asp
(search by month & go for August)

Let me know if you need more info or links.

btw, we're having fireworks in Kuala Lumpur every day for the entire month of January - yup every day! It lasts about 20-30 minutes each.

NICE!!!!

I would love to go but will not be able to travel during that season.. work does call, unfortunately. Will you be taking advantage of those opportunities? Just go, spray-n-pray with the right settings (ISO 100 f/8 2-4 seconds works for me) and you're more than likely to get something good. A good shooting position is really the key. Thanks for the kind words

BTW for those wondering about the different framing - I did let go of the cable release for half a second to zoom in for some of them. 17-40 on full frame, no crop factor. I used to use a 10-22 on a 350D.

Sorry to hear that lightstream! Would have been nice to have your skills around to capture the event

Well done - I likee - and am a fan of firework shots, too.

Thanks guys

Also, to pass on something I observed at another fireworks shoot - one of the photogs had both the SLR and a little P&S there - and the P&S was shooting video. Neat idea, and a perfect excuse to bring the P&S!

You got some very nice ones there, Yoda! I've never had a whole lot of luck shooting fireworks, but I haven't really tried very often.

Lightstrteam,
Nice pics! Liked the "city on fire" on number 2! The car lights look like everyone is "getting out."

Question. Noticed you're running auto WB. As a fireworks shooter... do you normally ever need to do any WB correction?

Thanks for posting. Never shot fireworks before. Knowing your standard settings is a big help. Makes me want "to take a shot at it"... so, maybe I will!

thomascanty wrote in post #2608566
You got some very nice ones there, Yoda! I've never had a whole lot of luck shooting fireworks, but I haven't really tried very often.

RangerRick wrote in post #2608640
Lightstrteam,
Nice pics! Liked the "city on fire" on number 2! The car lights look like everyone is "getting out."

Question. Noticed you're running auto WB. As a fireworks shooter... do you normally ever need to do any WB correction?

Thanks for posting. Never shot fireworks before. Knowing your standard settings is a big help. Makes me want "to take a shot at it"... so, maybe I will!

Glad I could inspire some others!

Yeah #2 is an interesting effect.. I haven't seen this with other fireworks before. I also made some changes for this shoot, as I tried to expose for the background as well without compromising my settings. The background is -1 stop underexposed, but that still works fine.

WB correction is seldom needed. In fact for most of my shooting AWB is fine. Canon cameras have excellent to outstanding WB except under tungsten lighting. Outdoors, even in extremely mixed lighting scenarios like this one, it does well. I shot all of these RAW (although frankly I prefer JPEG though I was experimenting), the more I tweak, the worse it looks, whereas auto is closest to what I saw in person. Almost all the shots were converted straight to JPEG with the defaults.

The only camera that really needs WB tweaking is the 1D classic (4MP). Many others have complained about too much green as well. 350D and later cameras are pretty good.. never needed to adjust.


The most important thing is a tripod, and some understanding to work out exposure calculations since metering will largely be useless for the fireworks. Metering would probably only be useful for your background but getting both would be tricky - this is the first time I've made a deliberate effort to try.

Nice shots, Lightstream. Have you ever been to Sydney for the NYE fireworks? I think you'll have an absolute ball of a shooting-fest - erm, besides the entire afternoon of camping out a good spot!

I only got into fireworks a little while ago. Like you said, metering and WB tinkering isn't so important. I just usually plant the camera on the tripod (which reminds me I should order a remote) and experience (and a bit of trial-&-error) will tell you how long the exposures should be. If you've got any specific tips, please tell.

Feel free to chimp

Most good fireworks displays are 10 minutes. Don't worry about missing a couple of frames to adjust the framing so you can get better shots. Quality, not just quantity.

Ebay remote works fine.

Fully understand the part about the camping and waiting. Most other events I've attended involve some degree of that. I was lucky for this one - set up 20 minutes prior and the crowd only showed up after the shells started going off.

I've had troble with fireworks. On my pns, I can expose up to 8 seconds only. After the 8 seconds, the cam takes like forever to write the image (I think) before I can take the next shot. Is this peculiar to pns cams? How long do you have to wait with your dslr?

Generally, it seems to me timing is very important 'cos once you trigger the long exposure, and if nothing happens or if an uninteresting sequence starts, you can't abort and re-click.

Sounds like you have the option to automatically clean up hot pixel noise turned on. With that enabled, after the exposure, it has to take another shot of the same exposure length with the shutter closed (called a black frame) so it can find where the hot pixels are and cancel them out of the first photo. So, if you did an 8-second exposure, it isn't even going to START writing to the card until another 8 seconds have gone by.

Turn that off and do it yourself in post processing. Your write times will go back to normal again.

Not saying that P&S are bad, but at one of the fireworks shoots I went to, I stood behind someone with one of the Panasonic 12X superzooms. Now I very nearly bought that instead of my 350D, ending my DSLR days before they'd ever begun.

I did notice that his camera would display "PLEASE WAIT" with the rotating hourglass after every shot while it wrote to memory and I was thinking good thing I didn't buy that.. it would have driven me NUTS....

I set my SLR to drive mode and it keeps firing as long as I hold down the button. Delay between shots is negligible even on the 350D because the camera writes in the background.. that's how the SLRs achieve such high drive rates.

Different P&S have different limitations.. for example there are a certain range of apertures that cannot be used on my Canon A530 at certain focal lengths. I can only adjust aperture in TWO stop increments.. so if I was at f/2.8, the most I can stop down to is f/5.6. Better P&S offer more flexibility.

What I'd do is use the P&S to shoot video