Fireworks Post Show Thoughts

The key to facilitating success is the three P’s of p-p-photography; preparation, patience and perseverance. Actually, that’s not quite true, it’s more like perpetration, perpetration, perpetration and luck.

Keep in mind, shooting fireworks is about as close to shooting on an assignment for a newspaper, wire service or client as you can get without actually being hired. The shows are brief, so there’s a real hard time limit for your work. When the action starts, it doesn’t stop for anything and there’s no time to make major adjustments.

Perpetration is also key in dealing with the unforeseeable and completely random things that always crop up in the shoot. In this case, mother nature threw me a curve ball and started it raining before the show. Secondly I was able to see another display much better than I anticipated, and the show I was trying to shoot was later in starting than I expected.

Preparation

When do you need to start? Well that depends, but in general as early as possible. The first order of business is to determine the general area where you’re going to shoot from. Scout out some potential shots, and some backup shots. A large part of preparation is planning, the 4th hidden p. That’s to say while you’re out looking for locations start thinking about what you need to make happen if the show shifts location or someone parks a big truck or boat in your line of sight.

The second stage of preparation starts the evening before the shoot. This is when you do your last minute tests. Will the camera keep firing when set to continuous and the cable release is locked off? It should, but it’s always a good idea to double check anything that you will rely on and haven’t done before. Are you using a flash for this shoot? If so, recharge the batteries, pull out the manual and make sure all the custom functions are set up properly. If you know you may need to do something that you don’t normally do–like say put an SB-800 into SU-4 mode–run though the procedure a couple of times then make a cheat-sheet up on a small notepad or note card that you can keep in your pocket. It’s also a good idea for equipment that doesn’t have text labels or descriptions for custom settings to make a crib sheet that you can attach to the device, or keep in that notebook.

If you’re going to be shooting things before your setup, now is a good time to put together a pre-show checklist. In truth this checklist should include your habitual procedure for resetting then setting up the camera, making sure your gear is setup properly, taping off anything that need be secured, etc. etc.

Do a dry run with the gear. Pack all the gear up the same way you’ll be taking it to the location. Then pull it out and set it up just as you would be doing on the location, including running though setting up your cameras, flashes, and any other gear you’ll be using. Make sure that there aren’t any surprises with how you’re going to setup, because there will be when you get on location.

So how does this work out in practice? Well here’s how my preparations for this years Forth of July fireworks display went.

Initial preparations were simplified by shooting from my back yard, there was no need to scout locations or think too hard about where things were going to go, as I knew about where the fireworks would be, and about where I wanted to put my cameras. What I did do though, was take a camera with a wide angle lens (my 18-55mm which would be used on my remote) and check the coverage at each place I had envisioned possibly shooting from–both the primary and backup locations.

Starting the night before I began with the camera setups. First priority was testing to make sure the one thing I wasn’t 100% positive about, continuous shooting with the cable release worked properly on the rebel. So I set the camera up on a tripod with the cable release, set the camera to continuous and locked the release down. Sure enough it fired continuously as I expected it to, but I had to be sure. After that I pulled one of each camera’s two batteries and poped them in the charger, any testing I needed to do I could do on one battery, and then put the used batteries in the charger and have two fully charged batteries for the next day.

With the camera’s set up it was then time to wait for the next day.

The run up…

T-4 hours: I took both bodies with their lenses attached outside, to about where I wanted them to be, first I checked the composition and framing given where I expected the fireworks. Mostly I was looking to make sure that there wouldn’t be a bush or plant in the field of view. I did this at both the primary and backup locations. Finely while it was still light out and there were good distant targets to focus on, I zoomed the lenses to where I was going to be using them, and focused them at infinity. Then gaffer taped the AF switch to manual, and the zoom and focus rings so they couldn’t be changed.

T-3 hours: The cameras were mounted to their respective tripods, the cable releases were connected and the settings were rechecked again.

T-2 hours: It started to rain, of course everything was already ready to go, so I just had to deal with the rain. So I cut a couple of trash bags and heavy paper sheets up to act as covers to keep the rain off the cameras. A final check was made and the camera’s were covered up and ready to go.

T-10 to estimated show start: One final check that everything was on and secure, and the cameras were carried out to where they’d be shooting from.

T-0: Close the release on the remote and lit it rip. From now till the end of the show 16 minutes later, this camera took 4s exposures continuously.

T+2: I was a bit confused by the fact that the show that was going on wasn’t where I expected it to be, so I rushed to make some quick adjustments. I moved the remote to the backup location and quickly reaimed it, and adjusted my primary to point to where the action was.

T+12: The actual show I wanted started almost exactly where I predicted it should have, not quite it was a little further west than I expected but close enough. Oops. Of course, I didn’t have a lot of time to make adjustments, so I just turned the remote to point in the general direction and quickly moved my primary to it’s backup location to get a better angle due to a boat’s mast being in the way. From this point forward I rant the primary trying to get nice clean bursts and let the remote do it’s thing.

T+21: The show was over. I took my primary inside and went back and turned the remote off and brought it in.

Total time actually shooting 20 minutes from setup to final frame, though it felt a lot quicker. There was almost no time to make adjustments to anything during the show. At least not without loosing a lot of opportunities.

Lessons Learned

The first thing is it’s a real good idea to know exactly when the shooting match starts, and where it’s going to be. Obviously this isn’t a problem when you’re being told “go here at such and such a time and do this” but it is more of a factor when you’re out on your own. Second it’s a good idea to know where things are going to happen. Again if you can see the subject that’s not an issue.

In this case I should have set one of my primary body’s custom modes to match the remote’s normal mode, so if I had to step away to deal with something I could quickly flip it into continuous shooting and quickly go address the problem. This is a big win for the Canon 40D over just about anything else out there. It’s 3 programmable modes can be setup to save any configuration (shooting mode (M, Av, Tv, P), film speed, aperture, shutter speed, metering mode (evaluative, partial, spot, center weighted), drive mode (single shot, continuous), etc), by setting say C1 to mirror the settings on my remote (Manual, 4s at f/8, ISO 100, continuous release), all I would need to do to make my primary mimic my backup would be to turn the shooting mode knob to C1 and lock the cable release down. When I came back, I’d only need to switch the mode knob back to M and I’d be right back to where I left the camera.

I’d also tape down anything that could get loose or fall out. I had my cable release on my remote fall out after the show when I was carying it back in. It wasn’t a problem then, but it would have been a problem if it did that while it was shooting, or even worse, if it had fallen out and I couldn’t find it again. So in the future, I’ll gaffer tape both the connector into the socket and the cable release cable to either the camera body or the tripod.