Fireworks at San Lorenzo de El Escorial

[hitkaiser]

San Lorenzo de El Escorial is a town about 60km north of Madrid (Spain). It is famous for its large monastery (pictured). In August they celebrate their patron saint day with fireworks, since the town is almost surrounded by mountains, it is an excellent opportunity to grab some fireworks shots from above rather than the more common, ground view.

The location was important, even though there are a million places I could have taken the shot from, it isn't always garaunteed that I would have a clear view without any obstacles (such as trees) getting in the way. Luckily, I didn't need to scout the location, a friend had done a similar shot last year and was happy to share with me the coordinates so I could get there using my GPS. Since I hadn't been there before (and it was driving up a mountain road in the dark), I made sure I left early to get there on time.

One big mistake I made was to not take any torches with me. There was no lighting on the mountainside which made it difficult to:
1. Walk to the vantage point once i parked the car
2. Swap Lenses
3. Watch out for cow dung on the way!

Luckily, one person of our 7 member "expedition" was sensible enough to bring 2 small torches so we tried walking as close together as possible and shared the light when swapping leses.

Once we found the vantage point, we set the torch on the edge, so we would know at all times that walking beyond the torch meant taking a fall down the side of the mountain!

We had about 30mins to setup the tripods and cameras.

We were quite far from the town and the monastery appeared quite small, I knew I would be using my zoom lens so the first thing i did was to place my 70-200 and tried a couple of sample shots to get the composition right.

I tried following the rule of thirds as a general guide, so i placed the monastery on the bottom right quadrant and left the top left quadrant free for the fireworks. I didn't know how tall the tallest fireworks would be so I erred on the side of caution and zoomed out as much as I could knowing that I would be cropping the photo later on to whatever height the fireworks would be.

Before the fireworks began, the monastery was lit up, so it was easy to focus using Auto Focus. Once the fireworks began they turned the lights off making it hard to focus (it had to be done manually). Once I had my composition set up, I switched focus to manual on my lens so it wouldn't jump around in the dark once the fireworks began. During the fireworks I did change the focal length once meaning I had to focus again, it had to be done manually and there was no easy way of knowing if it was right or not. The shot pictured in this thread was the second focal length I used (70mm) and focus was done manually.

Getting the exposure right was all about trial and error. I put the camera in Manual mode and set a small aperture (smaller than f18) and used a Bulb exposure. I made a couple of experiments by taking exposures of upto 1min long to see at what point the main subject in my photo (the monastery) would be overexposed. I did the same thing for the lower limit, the point at which it would be underexposed. Having completed my experiments, I knew that at ISO 100, f18, my exposures would have to be atleast 20 seconds long and less than 40. Anything inbetween can be "fixed" in post processing if needed.

Here are the stats for the image shown:

Exposure: Manual
Focus: Manual
Shutter Speed: 34 seconds
Aperture: f18
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 70mm (cropped down in post processing)

Special settings: Mirror Lockup was enabled in the camera to avoid tremors. Used a remote to begin/end exposures. Turned off Image Stabilisation (IS) on the lens as it was on a tripod and IS jumps around when on a tripod.

There wasn't much work to be done in post processing. I cropped the image down to suit the height of the fireworks, upped the exposure of the image and used the fill light slider in Lightroom to bring some light to the shadows between the fireworks and the monastery (which was very dark). Increased saturation by a bit.


Equipment used:

Tripod: Manfrotto 190XPROB (With a Manfrotto 488 Ball head)
Camera: Canon EOS 400D
Lens: Canon 70-200 f2.8 IS L
Remote: Canon RC 1

[derekspacelewis]

The fireworks came out great! Good job with the picture and the description, it was very thorough.

[hambino]

awesome pic! (One question: what's a torch? )

[hitkaiser]

Originally Posted by derekspacelewis

The fireworks came out great! Good job with the picture and the description, it was very thorough.

Thanks!

Originally Posted by hambino

awesome pic! (One question: what's a torch? )

Thanks! A torch is a handheld device that emits light and is used to see in the dark. It's known as a flashlight in some countries. Whilst the torch isn't used in the actual photo... it was definitely useful in the preparation running up to taking the photo. To see how dark it actually was, here is a short video a friend posted of the location:
Óscar López Rogado - Haciendo fotos de fuegos artificiales con mis amigos de "frikis de Madrid" (flickr). - TwitVid (I'm the guy in the red tshirt)