The weather was questionable for the Canada Day fireworks display on July 1, 2019. Warm in the afternoon, but soon lots of clouds, rather cool weather (for July) and heavy wind as the day progressed. By early evening the temperature dropped considerably. We kept close watch on the forecast and the City's Twitter feed, hoping that the wind would diminish and the rain stayed away so the City wouldn't cancel the show. We were rewarded with almost perfect weather - a little cool, but only a light breeze and dark clouds approaching from the west provided a great backdrop for the show.
Our good friends Norm and RoseMarie attended with us, and we set up our cameras on the peninsula that crosses Henderson Lake. This was a perfect spot to watch and photograph the show.
It was time to experiment as we had never seriously attempted to photograph fireworks. We had a number of sources that suggested the "ideal" camera settings, but of course I prefer to experiment. In the end I might end up at the same settings as suggested by a third party, but by experimenting I actually understand why certain settings work and why others don't. I get more satisfaction from following this approach, and I get to innovate.
Brenda started with the settings suggested by a web site she found, which recommended using F5.6 to F8. Unfortunately early on, as she was trying to adjust the field of view, her cameral disconnected from the tripod. The custom plate she has is finicky, and rather than fumbling in the dark to reattach her camera to the tripod, she turned her camera off so she could just sit back and enjoy the show. We always try to remember that our first priority is to see the show whatever that might be, and photography is secondary.
The following photos are the results of my trials. I'm quite pleased with the results, and learned a lot about camera settings for fireworks photography. All of the photos below were taken at ISO 200 and F11. I varied the shutter speed between 3 and 5 seconds. Of course the longer shutter speed collected more explosions, but also seemed to display more of the lingering smoke. In some cases, it almost seemed like the longer shutter openings actually resulted in photos that were a little too busy. You be the judge ...
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