Shooting Fireworks...

[Ambitious]

Hello,
Quick question for everyone seeing as I'm still fairly new to all of this. I was after some tips on the best settings for shooting Fireworks in the sky as opposed to up close like the wheels.

I tried some manual settings but found they either show too much blur, the flash ruins it or no flash is under exposed. I thought about just sticking it on automatic but then the defeats the object of trying to learn to use the camera's full cabilities.

I'm aiming to capture the Fireworks over Cinderalla's castle in Magic Kingodm so I want to perfect it before I go

Thanks
JJ

[Sloseph]

I love shooting fireworks, its really quite easy and lots of fun

What you need

DSLR
Tripod
Lens
Cable release (helpful but not necessary)

Find where the fireworks are going to be in sky its normally 1 set section of sky, point your lens at it, then set yourself to manual focus

Set your aperture to about f5 then your shutter speed to BULB

Start snapping, hold the shutter down for a longer shutter speed which will then give you light trails and look pretty fantastic

[jojonac]

The main DPS blog has posted a how to shoot fireworks every july for the last three years it seems. So you might want to try a search there.

Other wise what Sloseph said is pretty good advice. The tripod is a must, and if you dont have a cable release you can set your camera to shutter priority and play with exposure times. A good range to start with would be 3-10 seconds. But I recommend you experiment.

jojo

[UlpilotSC]

The thing with a lot of fireworks is they use a lift charge of black powder, and the time before the burst is determined by a fuse burning as the thing foes through the air. You can usually see this as a faint spark trail as the shell ascends. Disney is like a lot of big outfits, they shoot their shells with compressed air, which then explode based on an electronic trigger built into the shell.
In a lot of displays it's easy to see when the shells are going up and about to burst, because of the fire trail. Sunset - not so much. I'd set the shutter on manual, and just count seconds, if you use five seconds for example, the shutter might close during the middle of a big burst.
Usually the first part of a fireworks show is the best to photograph. You don't realize how much smoke gets in the air during these things until you are photographing the end of a ten minute show.
Don't get too close to the castle. The fireworks are actually farther back in the park, behind the castle. If you are right up on the castle, you will miss a lot. If you want some long range stuff, watch from the beach at the Polynesian resort. They even pipe in the music for you over there.
I've found focus on a zoom lens can be a bit tricky for these types of things (fireworks/lightning). If you have a 50 or 85mm you might just put that on and crank it around to the stop where infinity is. Your probably going to be using a wide aperture just so you can catch more light, you don't want focus or depth of field to be an issue.