Photographing Fireworks

(I wrote this article in 2019 – but as my old web server is going away I re-publish it here)

To begin the new year in Germany people do usually a lot of fireworks. Although I personally think its a complete waste of money, I thought why not take advantage of other people burning (literally) their savings and let’s do some photography.

My setup was as follows:

• Wide angle lens (11-20mm, I tried several settings, 20mm worked best).
• Tripod. Of course. Make sure there are no streetlights in your view.
• Miops Trigger. You can use any kind of automatic trigger device. Modern cameras even have this built in. I set the trigger to pause for 3 seconds between the shots so I can check the screen.
• Aperture: After several tries with overexposed pictures I settled on f14. f8 also worked fine.
• Exposure time: Depends on how much fireworks is going on. At the end, 3 seconds were enough.