Experimenting with long exposure (1 Viewer)

[Scott Merryfield]

Congrats, Sam! That was an excellent shot. Were all three bursts there at one time, or did you use some multiple exposure technique? I found that most of the shots I took with multiple bursts in the air at once resulted in an over exposure that I couldn't correct in post processing, even shooting RAW.

 

[Sam Posten]

That was a single 1 second exposure, no photoshop tomfoolery other than levels and cropping to a square. =) If you do a google search for "red white and blue fireworks" it's always the first picture, so it gets quite a few hits a day.

 

[Don Solosan]

Awesome, Sam. I've seen that shot of yours before, and it's definitely first rate.

Scott, yes, I've been pleasantly surprised by the video quality. It's too bad I have to compress it so much to get it online.

 

[Scott Merryfield]

Originally Posted by Sam Posten

That was a single 1 second exposure, no photoshop tomfoolery other than levels and cropping to a square. =) If you do a google search for "red white and blue fireworks" it's always the first picture, so it gets quite a few hits a day.

That was probably my problem -- using bulb, my shutter speeds were probably always more than a second (more like 2-5 seconds). I found what worked best was to open the shutter when the burst first started and close it when it dissipated. However, for multiple fireworks going off at once, this resulted in a severe over exposure.

Next time, I think I will try auto bracketing my exposures by 2 stops, too, to give me more leeway. I never use that feature on my camera, but this seems like a perfect application for it.

 

[Sam Posten]

You can also bring a piece of black cardboard with you and cover the lens opening while using bulb during the 'flight' sections of a shell and removing it during the 'burst'. Can be kinda neat. I think the cool thing about fireworks is you pretty much have at most a half hour worth of time to experiment then a whole year to regret mistakes you made and make plans for next time. Unless of course you live at Disney World where they do fireworks every night!

This is also the beauty of Digital. You can see results as you go and compensate to taste!

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

Originally Posted by Sam Posten And yeah, ditto that sentiment about digital.

_Man_

 

[Scott Merryfield]

Originally Posted by Man-Fai Wong /forum/thread/289781/experimenting-with-long-exposure#post_3584079

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

Originally Posted by Scott Merryfield

_Man_

 

[Scott Merryfield]

Man,

For the over exposures, you are correct. I was actually thinking more about trying to reduce the amount of light trail in order to better show the burst. Hence my thoughts on opening up the lens in order to get a quicker shutter speed.

The difficulty in judging exposure with fireworks is you never know how bright the burst (or multiple bursts) will be until after it happens, and there is a large variant in exposure amongst the different bursts. Then it is too late to adjust, so it becomes a guessing game with lots of missed shots. At least by shooting RAW, there is some leeway to adjust the exposure in post processing and save some of the shots, as long as the exposure is not too far off.

 

[Cees Alons]

You can try automatic exposure and put the exposure setting down, i.e. -2.0. That will also give you some room to make corrections later, if necessary after all (hopefully not).

Manual is better, but you have to be very secure then. A bit of luck is always needed. I think I posted some of these before:

 

[Sam Posten]

VERY nice!