Photographing firework displays
Staying near Cardiff one night on the 5th November, I remembered that my home town of Caerphilly with its famous castle sometimes held spectacular fireworks displays at about this time. Checking the local South Wales Echo I was not disappointed. I left in what I thought was plenty of time to scout out a good vantage point before the crowds arrived, and stake my location with a tripod as photographers do! Having been away for years, I failed to appreciate how popular the display had become. Although Caerphilly is only 20 minutes drive north of Cardiff, I found police had already shut-off Crescent Road which gives a prime view of the castle and its moat from the west side. All the familiar backstreets were already congested (I as drove around I half expected to see a face that I would possibly recognise from school days). I eventually engaged the traffic-laden Piccadilly and headed out of town along Van Road towards Rudry. There I was directed to a new car park near the business park (all new to me), which I presumed must be very close to what locals (particularly elderly ones) would remember as the ‘tar plant’. Memories and images of the tragic fire here in 1959 came flooding back, and it seemed strangely odd to be parking on this former site in order to witness another type of fire display.
When I arrived at the castle, crowds were already pouring in and that completely thwarted any attempt of planing a composition. I grabbed the first vacant location at the water’s edge on the south moat and just hoped for the best. By now it was raining heavily and I started to despair; this was hopeless. Anyway I took a few trial shots to check that the castle, and where I presumed that the fireworks would be launched from, was crisply sharp, and that the histogram revealed no clipping of either the shadows or flood-light areas on the castle. By now I had no chance to change location or remove vegetation in the bottom left of the images.
Autofocus simply wasn’t going to work in these conditions and would probably sent off ‘hunting’ in the poor light. You simply don’t have time to make adjustments or check focus when the action is fast and relentless in these visually stunning displays. So I focussed manually prior to the fireworks and didn’t touch it again. The difficulties in planning the shoot, however, are (i) guessing where exactly the fireworks will be launched from, (ii) their height and the width of display, and (iii) hoping to engage enough foreground to capture reflections in the moat. Unfortunately the summer algae still persisted leaving a surface residue of sludge. Rain was still falling and a wind was whipping up causing my camera and lens protective cover to flap in front of the lens as I struggled keep rain drops off. I persisted despite my lack of organisation. I also knew that I had to get it right from the start because shortly after fireworks start, it is quite usual for a thick smoke to develop that can envelope the scene and partially obscure the castle and fireworks. I also didn’t have time to check the wind direction so that I could have positioned myself up-wind of the smoke. So it was all stacking up against me.
With the focus set and with a selected aperture at about f/8 and an ISO of 100, I didn’t intend to manipulate controls too much mainly because these are frenetic displays often last no longer than 15 to 20 minutes, leaving little time to view and change settings; or if I did opportunities would be lost. I couldn’t afford the additional time for noise reduction to complete its task and so switched it off. In any case, each burst of display will be quite different. The most important control was shutter speed and this required a fair amount of judgement. The degree of brightness varies considerably with some fireworks creating extremely bright light, which would readily cause over-exposure with clipping of the highlights (inevitable to a degree), to more subdued colourful bursts allowing me a few seconds more, or worse still a combination!
The camera has to be secured on a good sturdy tripod and a remote release is a must. I wanted no physical contact with the camera to minimise the risk of vibration and used live view knowing mirror lock-up may also help. The remote release is the prime means of controlling the shutter speed. With the camera set to bulb mode, I waited with the remote release in hand and decided when to trigger the shot, normally when I saw a new launch had reached close to its peak, and then I would gauge how long to keep the shutter open. I would start by assuming a general shutter speed of about 5 to 10 seconds. Should the display turn out to be particularly bright, I would tend to reduce this to about to about 3 to 5 seconds. The higher level rocket generated bursts proved more tolerate of exposure times of up to 10 seconds. This is where judgement comes in and adjusting this according to a quick inspection of the image, but I didn’t want to keep doing this. It was important to ensure that the fireworks were not over-exposed knowing I could pull some of the details out of the shadows on the castle during post-processing.
The display was full with multiple bursts at any one time. So much so that I didn’t feel the need to capture a series of bursts by prolonging the exposure by placing a card or some dark object in front of the lens between bursts to prevent the background from over-exposing.
