I really get to cheat with these.Originally Posted by iris lilies
They begin the show here each year when it is "dark", down in the village, at sea level. But I'm at a considerably higher elevation, and I can still see the sunset from up here, and it is nicely aligned with the direction to town on the 4th of July. In addition, from here, I can see the muzzle of the launching tubes on the barge they launch from, so I have a decent hit rate of catching the whole pyrotechnic.
Further cheating, I can set up the camera while it is still light. I use purely manual mode, and focus on the barge by hand while it is still light out, and then don't fuss with it at all. I try a variety of different exposure times however, as each pyrotechnic is different, and trying to catch the whole thing requires a bit of luck and guesswork. Somewhere between 1 and 8 seconds usually gets something interesting.
The final cheat is using an absurd medium-format camera that has a very sensitive low-light sensor that is huge, both in physical size and resolution, coupled with a very good lens. This lets me use a very low ISO setting (ISO 100 for these) at night, as the sensor allows me to easily recover the shadows when developing the raw image. I expose so that the brightest fireworks are just *slightly* underexposed, that way I don't lose any data when I develop. It's sort of how I do astrophotography as well.
So it's 90% planning/setup ahead, and 10% sitting on my deck sipping my coffee watching the show.
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