There are the usual places to view fireworks; out in the open, sitting on the bay with tens of thousands of people, or you can get creative and find your own little spot all by yourself. Jeff’s decision this night led us down to the Coronado Golf Course. He did some planning to find the best private view by taking in to consideration where the boat would be anchored in Glorietta Bay that was launching the display. He then carefully considered the foreground. There are few places as lush and beautiful as golf courses and Coronado’s 8th hole green is set up perfectly for a fireworks display over Glorietta since it has everything, palm trees and lush vegetation, a nice clearing, and best of all: a tranquil pond right in front for some nice reflections.

So we hauled our chairs and photo equipment down on to the links and setup at our location (right off the green of course as not to damage the dance floor.) Within a few minutes we realized how rewarding this private little location was. Are there better locations? Probably, but there’s something about large crowds I try to avoid if possible.

So here’s a checklist of things to consider when shooting fireworks:

What you’ll need

A SLR or any camera you can put in manual mode to adjust aperture, ISO, and shutter speed.
A sturdy tripod
A remote shutter release
Creative thinking for your location

ISO

Use a low ISO like 100-200. This will give you the cleanest noise free images.

Shutter Speed

Since the beauty of fireworks are the light trails they make, it’s best to use a longer shutter speed. Think somewhere around a couple seconds, but because fireworks all vary in size and duration, the best technique is to use Bulb Mode so you can have the shutter open for precisely the time you want. That way you can start the exposure right before the fireworks burst and stop it when the trails disappear. For this you’ll want a remote shutter release which explain later.

Aperture

A good aperture for fireworks is between f/8-f/16.

Manual Focus

Set you focus to manual and make sure it’s set to infinity.

Focal Length

Typically you’ll want to shoot at a wider focal length, but there’s nothing wrong with cropping it in a little tighter with a longer lens in an artistic and abstract way.

Use a remote shutter release

This helps for shooting with Bulb Mode and keeps you from having to touch your camera causing shake during long exposures. You don’t need an expensive one, just make sure it’s compatible with your camera. I think I paid $12 for mine and it works like a charm.

Use a sturdy tripod.

This is an absolute must for long exposures unless you have something else you can set your camera on, but you have a better chance for shake and damage to your beloved equipment by setting it on something not meant for holding cameras.

Creative thinking for your location

Shooting just fireworks is kind of boring. Add a nice foreground or something to tell a story. Be creative.

That’s pretty much it. Remember always to practice respect when using locations for your shoot and leave everything the way you found it. Especially golf courses.

Mid-day is rarely a good time for photo taking outdoors unless you’re shooting black and white, but life doesn’t always occur during the magic hour either so there has to be some type of compromise. Everybody has photos like these in their collection whether they use a $50 point-and-shoot or a 5k DSLR: images with a lot of haze and no punch to them at all. I decided today to browse through some images that would normally not be included on my site just to show you how to add a little more life to them.

As you can see, there’s a lot to be desired in this image. Bad light, haze, boring. I’m not going to go as far as to say there’s really any true rescue for this image. It’s never going to be worthy of much, but it can look better than this quickly and easily and I’ll show you how.

The first thing, and what will make a dramatic impact on this image is one click away. Click Image>Adjustment>Auto Contrast and it will add a lot more punch and clarity. It builds a histogram of the image and spreads the values out so the broader tonal-range is being used. This is very helpful for photos that have been taken in bad lightning conditions. This quickly makes images look more crisp with one click.

It made my image a little dark so I then opened up the Levels dialog Image>Adjustments>Levels and dragged the white arrow to the left.

My image is now looking better, but my sky is washed out and I want to balance out the overall photo so I’m going to add a faux neutral density filter to the top section to slightly darken the sky. This is an optional step and you could skip this if you want. Create a new layer for your gradient layer. I then start by making sure black is my foreground color, then I click on the Gradient Tool (G). and make sure the gradient is set to Foreground to Transparent as shown here.

Now using the gradient tool I click and drag down from the top of the image to just past the horizon.

This makes the top half of my image look like night time with the sun only shining on land. Only LSD or Armageddon could produce an environment like this so lets take this down a notch.

Simply reduce the opacity on the gradient layer to your liking and you have a better image than you started with. Could you do more with Photoshop? Yes. Could it be better? Yes, but this image isn’t worth spending a lot of time on anyway. I just wanted to show you a quick and easy way to improve images where you have no choice of the conditions you are shooting in.

This took two minutes to complete so now you can get back to watching Hoarders.

This one is the arch just north of Osprey Street.

After weeks of work, my new painting is finished. This is arguably the longest time I’ve spent on one project. I don’t think some of my large wall murals have taken this long to complete.