Independence Day Fireworks in the Eastern Sierra

People often ask me what my settings were for certain night shots, but the light on the landscape and your subject varies from night to night as the moon phase changes, it varies form hour to hour as the moon moves in the sky, and even from moment to moment as your point your camera in different directions and have more or less light pollution in your shot.  So when I pursue night shots, I focus on determining the best exposure, and I remain vigilant to adjust it as conditions change.

Normally you have to monitor f-stop, exposure time and ISO, but for fireworks the situation is simplified a bit.  The burning embers have a certain brightness which you can turn up or down adjusting f-stop or ISO, and the exposure time simply controls how long you want the trails of the moving embers to be.  You can determine the time between each shot fired, you can get many complete explosions of color.  Often an exposure time of around 4 seconds works well, but in this case the shots were being fired every 6 seconds, so I left one camera on an intervalometer capturing 5 second exposures at f/16, ISO 640, then triggering the next shot one second later, so they were 6 seconds apart in total.

Upon returning, I assembled the resulting shots into a time-lapse video, as described on my blog:
Create a Timelapse Video on Your Digital Camera
http://activesole.blogspot.com/2011/08/photographer-light-dance-pfeiffer-beach.html

Now fireworks tend to come up once or twice a year as a subject, so the process of determining how bright this particular batch of fireworks is, and the approximate spacing between shots is slightly different from  what you’re doing on other nights, opening up the possibility of forgetting something.  In this case after I assembled the sequence of shots in a time-lapse sequence, there appears to be a small variation in the focal length.  This slight zoom in/zoom out tends to be caused by leaving the auto-focus on, causing the camera to hunt for focus, and if it picks different focus points, you may not see unsharp images (especially at f/16), but when you put a lot of images together in a video, the  view appears to wiggle a bit.  I rarely make that mistake, but in this case, working two cameras at once also increased the odds of missing some detail.  So as a video this ends up being an example of what not to do, but it still illustrates the concept of producing a time-lapse video during a fireworks display.

As I look at this more it appears that I also re-framed the shot a couple of times during the fireworks display.  I’ve also been expereincing a bug in Lightroom 4 and 5 where a crop from one shot pasted into others does not always take effect correctly, so that may be coming into play as well..

Independence Day fireworks at Crowley Lake in the Eastern Sierra 2013

If you’re thinking of seeing this year’s fireworks at Crowley Lake, you can stop by the Visit Mammoth and Mono County Tourism sites to get some ideas for other great things to do in the area while you’re up there: visit Mono Lake, the historic Wild West ghost town of Bodie, explore Devil’s Postpile National Monument… there’s so much to do, you might need a week or two!

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