Capture the Fire Horse: My essential tips for photographing fireworks this Chinese New Year

With the Chinese New Year / Lunar New Year upon us, firework events will illuminate the night sky across the world from February 17. And while many of the biggest and brightest displays will take to the skies across Asia, incredible fireworks celebrations will be popping off across the West, too.

I like to think of fireworks photography as a specialist form of light painting. And while a fully manual camera and a sturdy tripod will enable you to capture the best fireworks images possible, the best camera phones are becoming incredibly adept at handling the unpredictable lighting conditions of a fireworks displaytoo.

Heck, if you’re lucky enough to own the Nikon Coolpix P1100, it even has a dedicated ‘fireworks show’ mode setting.

So, whether you’re thinking of saying goodbye to the Year of the Snake and seeing in the Year of the Fire Horse in New York, London, Sydney or elsewhere, here are my top tips for cracking fireworks photography.

Fireworks photography: Lenses

It might make sense to think of fireworks photography as low-light photography, since it usually happens at night, but fireworks are bright. As such, you don’t need a ‘holy trinity’ zoom or a super-fast prime; you can capture lovely fireworks images with a kit lens if you have to.

If you’re lucky enough to own a large selection of glass, you can choose the focal length that best suits your vision. If you’re photographing a sprawling display against a city skyline, you can opt for a wide-angle lens.

However, telephoto lenses may come in handy for displays that are further away or if you want to crop into the scene and focus more on the abstract patterns created by the fireworks. If you still can’t decide, then take a standard zoom lens as a middle ground.

Fireworks photography: Composition

When composing fireworks, you can attempt to frame the fireworks or frame an attractive scene and then allow the fireworks to populate the frame. The former is more suited to those with a longer lens who want to fill the frame with fireworks, while the latter is more suitable for locations with additional interest.

For example, if you’re photographing a display over a historic building, you could frame the building first and allow the fireworks to then populate the frame.

The challenge in either scenario is that you can never be entirely sure where the fireworks will be. As such, it’s always worth pulling back from your composition slightly to leave a little more room than expected. You can always crop if you need to, but you can’t ‘uncrop’. And of course, you can continuously refine your compositions during the display.

Arguably, the most photogenic locations to capture fireworks are directly above bodies of water. This enables you to balance the frame by capturing not only the fireworks, but their reflections in the water. A good tip for more inconsistent displays is to capture multiple identical frames and blend a few together using the best photo-editing software.

Fireworks photography: Focusing

There’s no point trying to focus on the exploding balls of light themselves as your autofocus system won’t be able to keep up. Instead, you’ll need to switch to manual focus and either set your focus ring to infinity (look for the ‘∞’ symbol) or prefocus on an object in the distance.

Alternatively, you can focus on an object on the same focal plane as the fireworks. If you’re using a wide-angle lens, you can approximate the hyperfocal distance by focusing a third of the way into the scene or employ double-distance focusing.

If you're prefocusing, make sure you switch to manual focus (if you haven't already) after you've locked your focus onto your desired point. Otherwise, you'll inadvertently end up engaging the autofocus when you fire the shutter button. (Note, this won't happen if you're using back-button focus.)

Fireworks photography: Exposure

Switch to manual mode and set your aperture to f/8 and your ISO to 100. This will give you a good base to work from, so you can tweak your settings accordingly. When it comes to the length of your exposure, you’ll want to experiment.

Exposures from one to ten seconds tend to work well, but you can experiment with longer exposures, too. The longer the exposure, the larger each explosion will appear, while potentially increasing the number of fireworks captured as more are launched into the sky.

While bulb mode is rarely necessary due to there being ample light, it can be used to activate the shutter upon a firework launching and then manually closing the shutter once it’s ended.

Whatever method you choose, you’ll need to keep a keen eye on the playback screen to ensure you’re getting balanced exposures. You can always increase your ISO or open up your aperture if you need to gather more light, or lower your ISO or narrow your aperture if you’re getting overexposed images.

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