Photos International Fireworks Festival Scheveningen 2013

These photos were taken with a Canon Powershot SX280 point-and-shoot camera at the Internationaal Vuurwerk Festival Scheveningen 2013. See below for a discussion on technique.

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The trouble is that cameras have a very hard time doing autofocus on fireworks. I also recorded some video, but it was useless because the whole thing was out of focus. Fortunately, the SX280 lets you do manual focus for photos, so I did that and simply set the focus to infinity. I also did the exposure manually, with the aperture wide open, the sensitivity at 1600 and turning up or down the shutter speed between 1/4th and 1/20th.

The slower shutter speed was good because I got some blue sky background and more foreground, but it also means the fireworks smears as it moves through the frame. This can be good or bad. With shorter exposures, the fireworks often seems anemic. Of course with long exposures you also get more camera shake induced blurriness.

The manual settings mean the shutter lag gets reduced significantly, but there were still instances where it took forever for a photo to be taken. Then once that first one went through, you could just mash the shutter button and get a bunch more without further delay. This seemed to happen especially after zooming. Or maybe I should have set the white balance manually, too, it could be that evaluating the white balance introduced additional shutter lag.