How To Photograph Fireworks

Photographing fireworks is a lot of fun, and can yield some very interesting photographs.  Every photograph is unique.  In order to photograph fireworks you need to have a tripod.  Without a tripod you will not be able to have the long shutter speeds that you need to photograph the fireworks.  Because in order to photograph fireworks you need to use long shutter speeds somewhere between 2-4 or more seconds, depending on how many fireworks you want in the shot.

Here are the camera settings you need to use.
1.  Low ISO settings, 100 or 200
2.  Shutter Speed about 4 seconds
3.  F-Stop around F18 to F22
4.  You also need to use a timer or a shutter release cable to minimize vibration

You need to use low ISO because the fireworks are so bright so you don't need a high ISO,  also the higher the ISO the more smoke you will pick up in your photograph.  The smoke drowns out the fireworks so you really should not use high ISO.  Shutter speeds need to be long in order to capture the exploding firework shells.  If you try and shoot with a fast shutter speed you most likely wont get the desired shot.  F-stops need to be high as well because it will make the aperture opening smaller which will cut down on the amount of light that is allowed into the camera. This is necessary because the fireworks are so bright compared to the dark background and you are also using long shutter speeds so you can't allow as much light in.  I also highly recommend using a timer or shutter release because you do not want the tripod to shake at all, including you clicking the shutter release.

This is how I photographed my firework shots.  So try it out and play around with these settings.  These settings seemed to work very good for me, but depending on the camera, different settings may work better than others.  Also if you photograph single fireworks you can put them together after words using photo editing software.  The shot above is 4 separate images together.

Astrophotography

This is my first attempt at Photographing stars.  I was amazed that in complete darkness that the camera can pick up on light that even the human eye cannot really see.  I wish the sky was clearer but I could not even really tell that there was all the white clouds.  I could only see the lower darker clouds.  I was really amazed to see the outcome because it looks like a sunset or sunrise shot with stars in the sky.  I cannot wait for another chance to try this.  In the photographs you can clearly see the constellation Orion.  I found out after I took the shots that the milky way galaxy was actually behind me and I wish I would have known, because from photographs I have seen it looks really cool in photos.  

In order to take photographs like this you need to set your camera to full manual mode.  Then change your lens to manual focus.  You need to focus your lens to infinity.  Your camera settings need to be:  A high ISO, as high as you can go without a ton of noise.  I used 6400.  Your aperture needs to be as wide open as possible.  I believe mine was about an f4.  Also you need to have a long shutter speed.  I used between 20 and 30 seconds.  The rule to find out what shutter speed setting you should use is called the rule of 600.

The rule of 600:

The rule is that you take 600 and divide it by the focal length of the lens.  For example I used a 20mm lens.  So you take 600 and divide by 20 and you would get 30.  The 30 is the number that you set your shutter speed to, in seconds.  If you go by this rule you should be fine.  If you go beyond these settings you will start to get streaks of stars because of the rotation of the earth.  Which can give your shots a cool effect.  But your camera must be able to have longer than 30 second shutter speeds in order to do that.