Pages

Fireworks

0 Comments

Unless you're talking about the song from The Tragically Hip's 1998 classic album Phantom Power, I've never been the biggest fan of fireworks. (yes the album is a classic and it is my favourite Hip album AND I will fight anyone who doesn't agree with that classic album classification). Some people get really excited about fireworks and it's a highlight of their summer to sit in a park and watch explosions in the sky.  Don't get me wrong, it's not like I want to be a debbie downer and I don't see why people may enjoy them, and if that's you then that's cool. You do you! But with the exception of my one day in Magic Kingdom, I've never seen a fireworks display that left me in awe (and lets face it, the fireworks were just a part of the larger show at the end a magical day). Even as a kid when we would go to the Canada Day fireworks, it was neat but I don't remember ever getting really excited about them. That being said it seems like you can't be a photographer and not take some fireworks pictures in the summer time. So with Canada Day being this week I picked up my camera and tripod, drove up a big hill overlooking the city, and parked my butt in a camping chair with a bag of sunflower seeds and waited for the sky to darken.

Now to preface this, I have never taken what I would call a good photo of fireworks. In fact I don't think anyone would consider any of my previous attempts at fireworks good. If you saw them you wouldn't even give me the phony "wow good job!" that a parent gives their child after recieving their hundredth piece of macaroni artwork that mysteriously goes missing from the fridge. Plain and simple, they sucked. So as much as I'm not a fireworks afficianado, this year I was going to at the least try to rectify my previous poor attempts. To stick with the childrens artwork analogy, I was going to level up from macaroni art to at the very least some kind of painted decorative rock that goes to live in grandmas garden. In the couple days leading up to Canada Day I watched a video or two and did some reading about fireworks photography what settings I should be using. I had a pretty good idea before this, but wanted to reinforce that I had an understanding of the theory behind it. Luckily even if I started to botch it with manual settings, I had an ace in the hole: OM System computational photography!


OM System's Live Composition mode quite frankly sounds like cheating. You turn it on, hit the shutter and as I understand it, the sensor only records new light that hit it rather than continuously exposing the entire image. So the shutter stays open like it does in bulb mode, and when a burst of fireworks go off, it only records that new burst. Sounds great right?  Well, when I things started happening I found it kind of finicky and slow because it had to process the image between shots. In the end none of the shots I tried with it worked out. Maybe it was just me and how I was using it, but in this case cheating didn't work out. So onto the next OM System feature: LiveTime Mode! It's like bulb and Live composition, but different and doesn't leave you hanging processing between shots. I've used it before for shots of the aurora borealis and it's worked great. This time was similar.  When you open the shutter you get a live preview of the image being formed over a series of frames. I think it worked well, but I think the biggest thing was after trying both of these modes, I didn't feel like I was getting exactly what I wanted to I just went back and did it the old fashioned way. I set my desired f-stop for the depth of field that I wanted and just openned my shutter up for two, then 3, and then 5 seconds.  Honestly, I think this is where things turned out the best for me (this is your lesson to not take the easy way out kids).


Now are any of these photos going to knock anyone's socks off? Likely not. However, considering my previous attempts I'd say that they are a good step in the right direction, and I do have a few takeaways from my experience.  One of them being that, lsimilar to shooting things like lightning, fireworks can be a complete crapshoot and there's a certain amout of luck involved. Also, as obvious as this may also sound, location matters.  I thought I was being smart by avoiding the crowds close to where the fireworks were going off, in addition of getting a nice view of the city to place them in context.  However there was little detail in where I positioned myself and I was little too far away from the action.  These images are pretty heavily cropped to cut out alot of empty space. Additionally, where I was located the wind was really blowing the bursts around.  As I understand it, if possible you should position yourself down wind of where they will be going off to get best results.

So in the end the photos were alright but didn't blow me away, but I'm happy enough with my progress, I spent an nice evening on a hill eating sunflower seeds with my wife, and I put in some reps on my photography journey. Nothing really to complain about there!


Danny Smandych

No comments:

Post a Comment