Earlier in the year I was given a chance to go over to a family members home to hang out and watch some fireworks. Normally I’m not huge on sitting in a huge crowd like we get when fireworks happen in my neck of the woods, but since the family members place is literally beachfront it’s much easier to deal with.
Anyhow I brought along my camera to take some photos of the fireworks since the last time I was able to do that was a long while ago and the new Z50 would hopefully do a better job overall.
And overall, at least after some editing, it’s going pretty good.
Shooting Fireworks is a bit more challenging than street photography. You need a long enough shutter to capture the movement of the fireworks without overexposure. Playing around with my lens I was able to get reasonable results by shooting with the lens sopped down to f11 and around a three second exposure.
Some shots came out ok, most were a little overexposed, but that’s where digital is nice – because I was shooting RAW each photo is effectively just a dump of whatever the sensor in the camera sees. This lets you tweak a lot of settings after the photo was taken in ways that you can’t do with a JPG. This means that even though the photos were slightly overexposed I could still go back and adjust them back to a better result.
Some of this stuff was doable with Film back in the day, however it was harder to pull off and you had to have a idea what you were doing before starting the process. Digital it’s literally just a slider that you roll backwards to reduce the exposure. Anyhow, more photos!