First off, let me say I’m not an astrophotographer, I don’t even play one on TV. Heck, I don’t even own a telescope. In fact if you’re a serious astrophotographer this is probably not for you.

On a lark I thought I’d point one of my faster lenses towards the heavens and see what I could get. Much to my surprise, I got more than I thought I would, even with only a meager 150mm lens.

Before I go any further, let me explain a little bit about the conditions here. I live in the middle of the South Florida tri-county urban sprawl, according to light pollution maps from Clear Dark Sky.com this is an 80 mile long by 18 mile wide swath of Bortle class-9 light pollution. The Bortle scale definition of Class 9 skies is below.

Sky is brilliantly lit with many stars forming constellations invisible and many weaker constellations invisible; aside from Pleiades, no Messier object is visible to the naked eye; only objects to provide fairly pleasant views are the Moon, the Planets, and a few of the brightest star clusters.

With the naked eye, I can generally make out magnitude 3-4 stars a pair of 8×50 binoculars helps a little but not much. Digital capture tends to get me a lot more , I can image stars as faint as magnitude 7.5 even on less than fantastic nights.

What to Shoot?

The Moon

The moon is obvious. It’s bright enough that it takes actual cloud cover to obscure it (use the sunny-11 rule (1/ISO, f/11) as a starting point) and large enough that you can get some detail with reasonably priced lenses in the 300-400mm.

The image above is cropped form the a shot made with a 400mm lens on an EOS-1D Mark 3. A crop camera is even better (i.e. Canon’s Rebels or x0D series or Nikon’s D300) thanks to the higher density sensors and longer effective focal length. I have images made with a Canon 70-300 IS on a 40D that don’t look much different than the one above.

Though nice, and with enough shots one could piece together a nice moon phase chart (a project I’ve been meaning to work on actually), the moon gets old rather quickly.

Planets

The planets are typically the next brightest thing in the sky. Though with out a telescope or a very long lens–which generally brings us back to needing a tracking mount–you don’t get much more than points of light and of all the planets. Jupiter is a notable exception and worth taking a stab at at least.

The images below were cropped from a single frames taken with a 150mm f/2.8 lens (left) and a 400mm f/5.6 lens (right) over two nights. Both exposures were a half second long with the lens wide open (f/2.8 on the left, f/5.6 on the right) at ISO 400.

You don’t get much detail, but you can watch orbits of the Jovian moons progress over time, which is marginally more interesting than looking at our moon. (Click the images to see larger versions.)

What about the other planets?

I haven’t tried imaging much more than Jupiter directly yet.

Venus, though bright lacks a moon removing a lot of appeal when you can’t resolve more than just a point of light. Most of the images I’ve made that have Venus in it have been sunsets where Venus shows up as a bright dot in the sky.

Mars, though it has moons, is very small and not that bright and it’s moons are very dim and relatively close.

I doubt Saturn will work very well at all, though. I won’t get a chance to try until January, then again the seeing will be better then too. Saturn itself is bright enough (mag ~1.4) to be imaged but it’s moons aren’t very bright (mag 9.6 max). Further the great distance to Saturn means  and the moons will be very close to the planet and I likely don’t have enough magnification to do anything about that.

Something else entirely

The last thing I’ve turned my camera towards is star clusters. Notably the Pleiades. However, with the amount of light pollution, none of the nebulae are visible, so they simply become a bunch of stars.

However, the stars themselves are readily visible and with digital capture and stacking, you can extract quite a few that aren’t visible with the naked eye.

Given the local conditions, I have never seen any of the Messier objects other than M45 (the Pleiades).

]]> http://www.pointsinfocus.com/2009/10/a-shot-in-the-dark-pointing-my-camera-skyward-at-night/feed/ 0 http://www.pointsinfocus.com/2009/08/night-sky-lightning/ http://www.pointsinfocus.com/2009/08/night-sky-lightning/#comments Mon, 24 Aug 2009 14:30:55 +0000 V. J. Franke http://www.pointsinfocus.com/?p=2183
Good lightning photography is one of the few areas of photography I really admire. The combination of sheer luck, power of nature and inherent danger of being outside in the path of an approaching thunderstorm certainly doesn't hurt the aesthetics of a well composed lightning bold either.]]>

Lightning is one of those beautiful, powerful and dangerous forces of nature that can make a wonderful photograph if your luck holds and the gods favor you. Good lighting photography is one of the few areas that garners serious awe and respect from me due to the total randomness of the subject. In almost every other area of photography it’s possible to can setup or at least encourage a situation that is conducive to maximizing your chances at capturing the perfict moment. Lighting, in my experience is not one of those.

Before you can even get started, conditions have to be just right. You need an active thunderstorm that’s just the right kind, in just the right position at just the right time. Too many clouds and you never get distinct bolts, not enough and there isn’t enough activity to make it productive. It also has to be the right distance away, if it’s too close it’s not safe to be outside and given my experience with thunderstorms you’re probably already in the rain.

After you’ve got a storm, everything you do is about maximizing the chances of getting a good shot. This is one place where working after dark helps, as it allows much longer exposures. In addition to that a moderately wide angle lens is useful (these were shot at 28mm and cropped down after the fact) to cover as much of the active sky as possible.

None of this is an easy feat. This summer in south Florida, I’ve seen less than a handful of storms that produced conditions suitable for lightning photography. Of them two have produced reasonably good images.

Setup and preparedness I find to be key for lighting photography. Though I can’t offer much in the way of guidance, you really need to develop a feel for the size, distance and activity of each storm. The lighting bolts themselves can vary in intensity from very bright to faint wisps, and catching the faint details without being overwhelmed by brighter bolts is challenging. I’ve had the most success with my camera set to ISO 100 and my lens stopped down to f/8 or so. I use bulb mode and a cable release to control my shutter speeds with exposures ranging anywhere from as little as 5 secondsand as much as 1 minute.

It should go with out saying that a tripod is necessary, and this is one of those situations where mirror lockup may be a good idea. However the necessity of mirror lockup in this case varies. On my EOS 1D Mark 3, I’ll set custom function 3-15 to option 2, “Enabled, Down with Set” which will keep the mirror locked up for the duration of shooting including the time between frames. On a smaller format camera, like my EOS 40D,  that lacks that setting and has a smaller lighter mirror and given the extremely long exposures I’m making, I’ll skip mirror lockup entirely.

As I said, there’s a lot of luck involved in being in the right place at the right time to get a great lighting shot. Also remember, that while the lightning is the main subject, all the rules of landscape photography still apply. That means remembering your foregrounds and the composition of major scenic elements in your image as well.

I don’t pretend to specialize in flower photography. In fact, I’d say out of the dozen or more times I’ve actually sought to photograph flowers I’ve made a hand full of images that I was pleased with.  This is one area I’ve been meaning to expand my skill set into though, and now is as good of a time as any.

An early attempt at photographing flowers, done more as a test of a new 50mm macro lens than as an attempt at flower photograph.

Basics for Photographing Flowers

Before we can get started there are obviously a few basic necessities. For instance we need a camera, that should be a given. Most cameras will be fine, a dSLR is probably preferable, but there’s no reason a point and shoot wont work. We’ll be using an SLR in this article, but almost all of the techniques covered will apply the same to a point and shoot.

We’ll also need a lens. If you’re using a point and shoot your decision on which lens has already been made for you. However there are some accessories that you might want to try, specifically a closeup lens.

If you’re using an SLR the lens selection is a bit more open. However there are some minimum requirements. The lens used should be able to focus at, or near, macro distances and magnifications, but that doesn’t strictly mean we need a macro lens. In fact depending on the size of the flower, almost any lens may do. I’ve shot flowers with everything from a 50mm f/2.5 macro lens to a 100-400mm super-telephoto zoom. The ideal lens might be a 90mm tilt-shift on a dSLR due to its great ability to control depth of field.

A fuzzy flower, shot hand held in natural light in the middle of the day.

Camera support isn’t a must, but at macro magnifications it’s very strongly recommended. It should go with out saying, a decent solid tripod and head are preferable to a cheap flimsy one. I use an old Bogen #055 aluminum tripod it’s big, heavy and stable, but many of the new lighter Bogen tripods (190 series) will work equally well. Even better are the Bogen pro tripods with an pivoting center column.

That being said, a tripod isn’t strictly necessary, and plenty of flower photography is done hand held (in fact most in this article were shot hand held) and there are times when abandoning the tripod is useful.

The last camera related piece of hardware is lighting related. This is two fold, we need one or more light sources and a way to control the light from them. Starting with sources, the cheapest is the sun. I’ll discuss this further as the series progresses.

Second, in terms of expense are tungsten lamps. These could be anything from studio grade hot-lights to simple work lamps from the hardware store.  The only drawback to tungsten lamps is heat, they get hot, and that heat could end up wilting the flower. As an alternative to tungsten lamps, compact florescent lamps may work but the ones from the hardware store are probably less than idea thanks to their color balance and inherent inability to produce the full color spectrum.

The final alternative is a flash, either a compact shoe mount flash or a larger studio style one. They offer several advantages over tungsten and florescent continuous lamps, they are full spectrum and color balanced, they can be very bright but their duration is short so they wont overheat the flower, and that short flash duration helps prevent things from blurring. The downside to using flashes is cost. A generic shoe mount strobe  runs about $100, an first party one can run between $200 and $500, and studio gear can go much higher.

The second light related equipment that’s needed is a way to diffuse and control light. This doesn’t have to be something fancy like a store bought softbox or macro tent. Most of the time I use white foam-core board or white mat board as a makeshift reflector. Even a white piece of typing paper will work in a pinch as a fill card.

For diffusing light I’ve made foam-core frames with tracing paper inserts, they’re ridgid and they diffuse the light quite well. I’ve also seen white trash bags used in a pinch. Larger diffusers can be built inexpensively as a PVC frame and use translucent white cloth even white bed sheets to diffuse the light.

Finally there’s the flower.

Conventional wisdom says not to use white backgrounds. However with a white flower a high key image is quite workable, and in this case directs attention to the yellow stamen.

A Primer on Conventional Wisdom

Conventional wisdom is often born from hard learned experience and years of refinement. That being said conventional wisdom, and really most rules in photography, aren’t unbreakable. The trick is knowing when to break them and when to take the safe route. Of course to do that we need to know what the conventional wisdom is.

I’ve done some digging into conventional wisdom for flower photography and most of it can be boiled down to two rules.

Conventional Wisdom 1: Backgrounds should be clean and non-distracting.

This applies to almost all types of photography. In order to focus attention to the subject, we force the subject to be the only thing in focus. In most cases the clean, as heavily out of focus, part isn’t a major challenge. At macro distances, depth of field is very shallow and the distance to the background very large relative to the subject. This alone will blur most everything in the background to just color.

However, the distracting part is a little more challenging and involves looking at the background as well as the subject. The number one thing we’re looking for are bright spots. Our eyes are naturally drawn to bright areas, even if they are out of focus. In the case of a bright blob in the background it will compete with and attract attention away from the flower.

Conventional Wisdom 2: Flowers should always be shot in diffuse light.

I think the theory goes like this. Flowers are soft, soft things should be lit with soft light. Okay, maybe not. However it is true that diffuse light tends to work well with flowers. Mostly because it can seap into the tiny cracks and crevices and fill them with light and bring out more details.

That being said, this is one of those rules of thumb that I’m going to play with to see if I can’t do something interesting with hard light and flowers.

Next time we’ll look at some basics of light and lighting and start looking at picking a subject.

Summer, for many photographers it’s a welcome relief from oppressive cold and snow and a chance to get outside and start shooting again. For me, it’s the beginning of months of oppressive heat, humidity and bugs. That is, it’s time to start looking for ways to stay cool. One solution that still lets me go out is to shoot sunrise landscapes. Of course, that brings a couple of hurdles. First, that requires early, often very early for me-think 4 AM or earlier-wake up times. Second, the dynamic range between sky and earth often demands a way to compress to the dynamic range the camera can capture.

House of Refuge at Dawn

Historically this large dynamic range was dealt with using graduated neutral density filters. While in many cases they are still one of the best ways to compress the high dynamic range scenes. However, I find using graduated neutral density filters to have some drawbacks.

• First, they slightly less flexible than blending separate exposures together, as they can’t deal with peaks and valleys in the horizon.
• Good ones, like those form Singh-Ray, are expensive and you often need more than 1 to deal with changing conditions properly.
• Finely, they simply are one more thing to contend with while trying to work very early in the morning.

As such, I generally avoid them and work with bracketed shots and HDR techniques. Blending images after the fact works best, and sometimes only, when absolute alignment is maintained between frames. The key to doing that, aside from using a tripod, is insuring focus, zoom and camera position don’t change between shots.

I was reminded of all this by my recent early morning failings and coincidentally timed post from Moose Peterson discussing the Nikon AF-S 14-24 f/2.8 where he reminds us about the importance of focus not changing between frames:

If you’re shooting something like HDR or anything else where the camera is on a tripod, I highly recommend that you first let the camera auto focus. Once it’s auto focused on the subject, take the MA switch and set it to M. It’s such a wide lens it can search for a subject. Even the smallest, smallest change in focus can really mess up something like an HDR series of images.

While he is talking about the Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 specifically, the same applies to any wide or ultra-wide angle lens and especially any wide-angle lens with an internal focus design (basically anything where the front element doesn’t move when you change the focus).

By decoupling the AF from the shutter release, I insure the camera won't change the focus when I expose a frame and I no longer need to worry about changing the AF/MF switch.

Unfortunately, the auto/manual focus switch is not something I tend use in general use and therefore is something that’s frequently ignored or forgotten when I need it. But there is another way.

Use the AF-On Button to Control the AF Instead of the Shutter Release

Some time back I wrote a Cool Camera Tricks article about using the rear AF-ON (or alternatively the AE lock) button to control the auto-focus system, it’s time to dig this back up. By decoupling the AF from the shutter release, I insure the camera won’t change the focus when I expose a frame and I no longer need to worry about changing the AF/MF switch.

This way, focus only changes when I push the AF-ON button and I don’t have to remember to flip switches on the lens back and forth constantly.

In addition, for this scenario, I turn the AF lock beep back on. In most cases I consider it annoying and unprofessional, but in this case it’s a lot better than trying to remember to look for the AF confirm light in the viewfinder. A simple beep when it’s very early is a lot more noticeable than a small light in the viewfinder as well.

Also, because the rear-button focusing technique wont prevent you from shooting if the image is out of focus, that some extra confirmation isn’t a bad idea. Effectively this makes the shutter release behave as if the camera/lens is in manual focus mode but it’s not and you still have the ability to press a button and it auto focuses.

Shooting now becomes straight forward.

Compose the image as you normally would, pressing the AF-On button to engauge the auto focus system and get things focused. When focus is achieved the camera beeps, and we’re ready to shoot. Now when you start the camera off shooting the burst, it won’t refocus and we don’t have to remember to switch the lens’s auto/manual switch either.

The following table shows what custom function to set for most Canon and Nikon cameras. Refer to your owners manual if you’re camera isn’t listed.

Normally I’d call it quits here, I’ve addressed the focus between shots issue and I could just say remember to set your camera up the night before. However, that just seems like a cop-out, and Canon makes it so easy to take this just that much further.

Read on to see how.

Canon provides such a nice solution on the 40D, 50D, 5D, 5D Mark 2 and many of their point and shoots with their Camera User Settings.

Easily Saving and Loading of Settings

My second concern is all the other pesky settings; ISO, aperture, release mode, bracketing, etc. Canon provides such a nice solution on newer cameras that are above rebel class and many of their point and shoots with their Camera User Settings (Saving and Loading Camera Settings on the 1D series). (I’ve discussed in a previous Cool Camera Tricks as well.)

Unfortunately, Nikon users and Rebel series users are mostly out of luck here. Rebel users can’t save settings at all, and while Nikon users can save some of the settings (custom functions and shooting options), they can’t save everything. However, for those who do have these modes we can solder on to a slightly easier morning.

I use a multistage approach to setting my custom modes, the first pass is to have the camera set to the appropriate auto-exposure mode via the mode dial (M, Av, Tv, P or B), that has in turn I have set the camera to my baseline configuration.

Basically, everything is now set like it would be for every day shooting.

I store this in one of the C modes, giving me a place to start with a base configuration. Then I switch the camera to the C mode I just programmed and start changing settings to what I want from the base configuration. Finely when I’m done changing settings, I re-save the settings back to the C mode I’m working in.

Doing it this way doesn’t change your normal settings so you don’t have to change things back.

My Camera Settings

To me the key settings are ISO, aperture, auto focus settings, and bracketing. Here are the key settings I’m using in my sleepy morning landscape custom mode and why I choose them.

1. ISO 100
2. Aperture Priority
3. Aperture to f/11
4. +/- 1 stop AEB
5. Pick a release mode
6. One Shot AF
7. Auto focus confirmation beep to on (Beep)
8. Custom Fn. III-7 Mirror Lockup set to 1: Enable
9. Custom Fn. IV-1: Shutter button/AF-ON button to 2: Metering start/Metering + AF Start

The first consideration is for the things that directly effect exposure and metering (points 1-3). These are solid starting points for landscapes in general. Keep in mind the aperture you want to choose may very depending on your lens and style. For my EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM, I find that f/11 is a reasonable place to start and a safe place to be in the event I forget to change things, there’s both enough DoF for keeping most things in focus, and I’m not moving too far away from it’s sweet spot.

The second consideration, (point 4) is to address the bracketing so I can deal with the large inherent dynamic range. Often I’ll end up using 1-1/3 to 2 stops, but 1 is a safe starting point and again, I’m looking for default settings that are safe enough that if I forget to change something there’s still a good chance I’ll get a decent image.

Next, to address the release mode (point 5). This is a matter of preference to some degree. In single shot mode, the camera (EOS 40D in this case, will fire a single frame each time you press the release. With the camera set to continuous release (either high or low), the camera will fire the 3 shot bracket while the shutter release is held down then stop. With the camera in either of the timer modes, after the shutter release is pressed it will wait 2 or 10 seconds and then fire the 3 shot burst.

If you have a cable release any of the options work, but single shot or continuous give you more control over exactly when each frame is exposed. If you don’t have a cable release, it’s best to use one of the timer modes.

Most of this type of work will be done using exposures in the range where mirror-slap induced vibration can affect sharpness, though how much it will affect things is dependent on many factors. Just to be on the safe side though, I use mirror lockup and a sturdy tripod for this type of work (point 8).

Point 9 is the settings for using the AF-ON button; this is the key bit where I get around having to remember to switch the AF/MF switch on the lens constantly.

Before you save these settings, remember to change any other options that you find you use or might find useful. One thing that might be useful is to change the camera’s sleep timeout to something longer than you usually would use. The way Canon implemented Camare User Settings, the camera will restore the settings saved in the C mode when the camera wakes up after, because of this I keep my C modes programmed with long sleep timers so they don’t go resetting changes I made while shooting.

Incidentally in the time since I started writing this post, Moose Peterson has put up a video blog post on using Split ND grad filters both at the time of capture and in post processing. For further reading on using split ND filters (and a lot of other cool filters) also check out the Singh-Ray blog.

Edit: Corrected error about capabilities of EOS 1 series bodies.

Dymanic Pose (Canon EF 100-400 f/4.5-5.6L IS USM; EOS 40D; 1/25th, f/5.6, ISO 800, 400mm)

Continuous release mode is often thought only to be useful when shooting dynamic subjects that are in motion. The burst of frames in rapid succession gives the photographer a better opportunity to catch the exact moment they are trying for. But there is another, often forgotten or maybe unthought-of, use.

Often the sharpest images, in a burst of frames aren’t the first or last images. Regardless of how smooth of softly you think you’ve pressed the shutter release, there’s always some inherent motion induced by that that isn’t there when you’re holding it down. Some photographers will always shoot in bursts of three just to counter act the motion pushing and releasing the shutter release induces.

In this case limited bursting, coupled with a good solid shooting stance and image stabilization can be used to create amazingly sharp images given the conditions. For example the images in this article, were shot with a Canon EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 IS, on a Canon EOS 40D body. With the 1.6 multiplier the effective focal length was 640mm, alone necessitating a 1/640^th or faster shutter speed (I actually use 1/2x the focal length because it’s both easier to do the math, and because the faster the shutter speed the less camera shake will be recorded). Even with the lens’s stabilizer, that only get’s at best 2 stops of stabilization, so a shutter speed of 1/160- to 1/200^th or so would have been the minimum.

But by using my camera’s ability to shoot at relatively high speeds, I was able to capture short bursts, and pick the sharpest images from the lot. In this case it let me get quite sharp images with shutter speeds as low as 1/25^th of a second in some cases. So next time you’re out shooting, and don’t have a tripod, give continuous release mode a try. The worst you can do is not get the shot anyway; and you may be presently surprised when you find one or two sharp keepers in the results.

Alert (Canon EF 100-400 f/4.5-5.6L IS USM, Canon 40D, 1/80th, f/5.6, ISO1600, 400mm)

This week in Cool Camera Tricks, I want to talk about a novel trick for managing auto-focus (A/F) in situations where the environment demands both tracking and static auto-focus, nearly interchangeably and quickly. For lack of a better word, I’m calling this 2-button focusing.

In it’s normal default configuration, and how it’s normally used, almost all cameras start their AF and auto-exposure metering (A/E) when the shutter release is half pressed. This is often just fine in most situations as there’s no real need to flip/flop between a tracking AF and a static AF, or at least do so quickly. Often though in wildlife photography, especially when shooting at a preserve like Wakodahatchee wetlands or Green Cay wetlands in Palm Beach county, you have a verity of shots switching rapidly between flight shots demanding continuous tracking AF and static shots of a bird on a perch or branch. In this case it can be difficult to remember to, or have enough time to, switch between the tracking AF and single shot AF.

The solution is to decouple the AF control from the metering so that you can still have the shutter release half pressed to take a shot, but have the AF controlled separately.

Before I get into the details of setting this up, here’s roughly how it works in practice. With the AF controlled by the AF-On button on the rear of the camera, an the focus mode set to continuous tracking, a flight shot can be done simply by holding the focus button with your thumb and the shutter release with your index finger as you would normally do. The AF system will track whatever is targeted, as long as the focus button is pressed. Then say you turn around and there’s a bird perched on the plant right behind you, normally if you continued to shoot with the tracking AF enabled, you’d have keep the center focus point on the bird to keep the camera from shifting the focus. Obviously that limits your compositional probabilities. The normal solution to the situation would be to set the AF mode to single shot, then focus and recompose. But not with two button focusing; with TBF you simply place your active focus point over the bird as you would in single shot AF, and press the AF button. When the focus correct, you simply release the focus button and shoot like you would if you were shooting in single shot or even if the camera was manual focus.

What’s needed for this to work? Obviously you need the ability to program one of the rear buttons to act as the AF-On button and the ability to remap it to control the AF.

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.

Blue and white fireworks over a canal

That’s right folks today is Independence day, at least in the USA, and to celebrate there’s nothing we like more than shooting off big things that explode! That’s right it’s fireworks time.

So it’s time once again to get out our cameras and point them skyward and hopefully catch the fun as the heavens are blasted full of colorful stars of burning pyrotechnical stuff.

But wait you say, “How do we mere mortals with camera’s capture these tremendous things?”

Well that’s quite simple actually, you’ll need

• A Tripod
• A camera
• A cable release
• and a good idea where the fireworks will be.

Wait, wait, wait, you didn’t say what kind of lens I need!

Well of course not silly, I don’t have the first clue how close you’ll be to the fireworks you’ll be photographing, as such I have no idea what kind of lens you’ll need.

So here’s the setup, put your camera on the tripod, and set the mode to manual, set the aperture to f/8 or there about, and the the film speed to ISO 100. If you’ve got a cable release, you may want to try setting the shutter speed to bulb, otherwise something between 4s and 8s is a good range. You wont need to enable mirror lock-up as that’ll just slow everything down, and besides at 8s the vibration from mirror slap isn’t going to be around long enough to affect the image. Focus the lens and lock it into manual focus mode.

To give you an idea, of how things work, the firework display I’ll be photographing is launched from about 1/3 of a mile away from where I’ll be. This year I’m going to have two camera’s running, a remote and my primary.

The remote will have a wide angle lens on it (28mm equiv) be placed low to the ground on the far side of a pool for nice reflection shots, and in the portrait orientation. The remote is going to be set at 4s at f/8, ISO 100, on continuous drive, with it’s cable release’s shutter switch locked down so it fires for the whole show. My primary body will have a slightly less wide angle lens on it, again placed low to the ground with water between it and the show with me sitting there. This body will be set at f/8, ISO 100; but the shutter will be set to bulb. This way I can start and stop the exposure as I need ot depending on what kind of firework I’m seeing. In my case because of how far away the firework will be, my camera’s will be focused at infinity, and like I said locked into manual focus mode.

Crazy flying sparks head out in all directions.

Oh yes, two other things to keep in mind, one is battery power. All dSLRs that I’m aware of use battery power to keep the mirror up and the shutter open. Last year I had to run for my backup battery because I didn’t have the primary battery fully charged and the increased load form shooting caused it to run dead. If you have a battery grip that supports two batteries, it’s probably a good idea to use them. If not, at least make sure your battery in the camera is fully charged and that your backup battery is close at hand.

The second thing is film, or in this case memory space, my remote will be shooting continuously for 4 seconds at a time. If the show lasts 10 minutes, and it takes me 1 minute on either end to turn the camera on and off, I’m looking at about 180 frames being shot. At 10-12 MB per frame, I’m suddenly looking at roughly 2.2 GiB of data. What I’m getting at here, is make sure you have enough storage for all your shots in your camera, and doubly so if you cant easily get to a camera (like my remote) while the show is going to change the card out.

Both firework images in this post were shot last 4th of July with a Canon Digital Rebel XTi and a EF 28-135 f/3.5-5.6 IS USM lens. Both were shot at f/8 and ISO 100. The first image was exposed for 4 seconds, the second for 9 seconds.