I’ve tried shooting fireworks for some time now with some but not a lot of success. I finally found the advise I needed from a four year old David Bergman YouTube video.

December may be a weird time to talk about firework as they are usually set for the fourth of July but this has not been a usual year by any means and being in Florida means that November can be a good time for fireworks too.

We have a local holiday parade which besides jamming up traffic for several hours starts with a pretty good firework display. I used David’s settings, got my focus point set just before infinity, and was able to get a number of pleasing shots. We did have an almost full moon that evening which was just behind the clouds. With an 8 second exposure I did get a small airplane on the left side of the image below.

Images were processed in Capture One Pro 20 and additional tweaking in Nik Software 3.0.

Trick is that the exposure of 8 seconds means you have to wait a bit before you can verify that you have the right focal length to get all of the fireworks in frame but not to far away.

So thanks to David Bergman for the best version of how to shoot fireworks. Can’t wait until we can have a real 4th of July or maybe get Disney to bring back nightly fireworks.