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Tips And Tricks To Take Pictures Of Fireworks – Happy July 4th!

posted in: Learning Photography, Photography - No Comments

9:09 am 9:09 am

I LOOOOOOVE fireworks!… I have to say they’re one of the reasons (ok ok like the 5th one) that I moved, but I’m so sad because since I moved they also MOVED the fireworks from they used to be, to the other side of the river =( .. And this year too =( so I don’t think there will be fireworks for me this year… we’ll be enjoying the BBQ =)

This is last year.. from the roof of a building in Manhattan

Exposure: 15 sec
Aperture: f/7.1
ISO Speed: 100

8 sec, f/14.0, ISO 100

And one of my iconic images from LIC, the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Queensboro Bridge

Exp 10sec – f/6.3 – ISO 100

There’s not an exact formula, you have to experiment on your own.

So the basic thing that you need, beside a camera that allows you to do long exposures, is a tripod.

I recommend also a wireless remote control to avoid movements in your shots but you can do just fine without it but you can get one for less than $6. I got a Nikon remote like 3 years ago and it still works great, no complaints whatsoever, back then I paid like $10.

You won’t need a super fast lens. I did the shots that you see here with my kit lens 18-55mm.

The other thing is that you have to find a nice place so be there early to claim it (works better if you scout the place earlier or a few days before) sometimes it’s nice to see the people looking at the fireworks but you’ll need a nice high place to do that. Like my friend Soon said, one of the biggest enemies to get nice fireworks shots is the wind. “Try to find a location where the wind blows toward you or away from you and NOT from side to side”.

After you get all set with your location and equipment you need to set your camera to "Bulb" or "B" (if you’re using the remote) and your Aperture will vary between f6 or even f10 more or less. That will depend on your location and the brightness of the sky, you’ll have to find what’s best for you before the fireworks start. Keep your ISO to 100 or as low as you can get it.

First, take a picture to compose your shot, you’ll probably have to recompose later but just to have an idea and make sure that your background is in focus. You can lock the focus or change it to manual, as long as your camera doesn’t move you don’t need to worry about it, but check the focus once in a while to see if it’s still fine.

The first ones are the clear ones and sometimes the best shots that you’ll get.. after a few minutes you’ll start to see a lot of smoke around and your picture will get a little muudy/polluted but sometimes this can be cool thing if you have interesting clouds in the sky.

To get just one explosion, I press the button as soon as I see it coming (to get the flare) and when its done I just press it again to finish my exposure. If you want to see a lot of them just leave the shutter open for a while but make sure that you’re using something around F12, otherwise you’ll get just white spots all over.

Remember that you won’t be able to get all of the fireworks.. If you get one or two good shots be happy with that.. After you get those you can experiment doing other things.
I moved my zoom while the exposure was on and I got this

You get the idea.. it can be cool =)

Try to zoom out and get the silhouettes of the people around you. Try different things and experiment.

The most important thing is to enjoy and have fun =)
Let me know if you have any questions, feel free to leave your comments and links to your fireworks pictures!

If you like this please share it with your friends!

Happy July 4th!!

014/365 – Falling drops

posted in: 365 Project, Learning Photography, Photography (Tags: 365challenge 365project2010, 365project, Photography) - No Comments

9:04 pm 9:04 pm

January 14th, 2010

Water is always great and today I played with it again…

Theme: Macro Abstract

Equipment: D40x, Sb-800, yellow gel (intense), tripod

Settings on camera:
Exposure:0.006 sec (1/160)
Aperture:f/14.0
Focal Length:55 mm (18-55mm)
ISO Speed:100
Exposure Bias:0 EV

The way I did this is not the most precise way to do it, but it’s a way to show that can be done with a little equipment as possible.

I’ve seen some videos about how to shoot water drops or water splashes but like a lot of people, I don’t have a lot of equipment so I have to do it with whatever I have handy and in theory you don’t need much.
At the beginning I was going to do this with a plastic bag (so the water would drop in the same spot) but I couldn’t find anything to hold it from above my setup, so that’s why I just held the bottle of water myself and tried to get the focus right =)

Materials: clear bowl, plastic bottle with cap, home made reflector. My regular reflector was too big for my setup so I used a home-made reflector (cardboard and aluminum paper).

-First I opened a small hole into the cap of the bottle (don’t try this at home =))

-I filled the bottle up completely with water and I just filled the clear bowl up a little more than half.

-Put the yellow gel on the SB-800 and pointed it at the reflector

-Set the camera on the tripod and tried some shots. At the beginning I had trouble finding the right focus and the best thing that worked for me was the plastic bottle (you can use a pen or something else to get the focus). I took a picture and locked the focus there.
focusing

-Once that I had my focus ready (after trying a lot) I started to shoot and shoot.

Drops

dropslines

drops3

Links:
How to photograph a splash of water {link}

013/365 – Out of the woods (+ how to do it)

posted in: 365 Project, Equipment, Learning Photography, Photography (Tags: 365challenge 365project2010, experiment, experiment with light, flash, green gel, how to, off-camera, sb-800, step by step, tutorial) - 1 Comment

8:45 pm 8:45 pm

January 13th, 2010
Theme: Macro Abstract

For the 365 Challenge today, I wanted to do something using gels… looking around my house and taking some things out of a drawer I ended up with this:

I’ll explain next how I did this step by step.

Photo equipment: D40x, SB-800, green gel, transceiver and receiver, tripod.

Materials: Zipper bags (clear), a green dish scrubber, water.

Settings on camera:
Exposure:0.033 sec (1/30)
Aperture:f/5.6
Focal Length:35 mm
ISO Speed:200
Exposure Bias:+1 EV

Settings on flash:
Manual mode
Power: 1/16

When I started I didn’t know exactly what I was going to end up with, so I put the scrubber inside the zipper bag and tried first with a small LED…
LED with green gel

… as you can see the light source is very small so I tried the SB-800 as my main light with a green gel.

Water makes things more interesting in pictures so I decided to filled the bag (just half) with water. My setup looked like this…
Set-up
(I use the slaves because my camera can’t handle the TTL by itself)

I took a couple of pictures and I got this:

Since I can’t get any closer with the 35mm (it won’t focus), I had to crop it in post. I used Lightroom to do that, also added blacks and clarity… and ended up with this…

I did some tests using the Mini Apollo on the SB-800 and got some other interesting results, also I filled the bag up completely with water ….

Final image:

After crop:
Green thing

Central Park Shoot – with Rick Sammon and John Williamson B&H

posted in: Equipment, Learning Photography, New York, Photography, Portraits - No Comments

11:26 am 11:26 am

Last month, thanks to B&H we were with Rick Sammon and John Williamson learning about lighting for two days. It was a nice day and here I’ll share some of the pictures that I captured and some techniques that I learned.

The first day was at the event space in B&H, we learned about the different types of lighting and what equipment we should use depending on what we want to achieve. Of course everything depends on the equipment that we have handy at the time of the shoot. You’ll notice that you don’t need a lot of equipment to get great images, the most important thing is to know how to use the tools that you have and master them.
The second day we went out to Central Park to test the equipment and all the techniques that we learned the day before.

Using a single reflector we can fill in the shadows. Let’s see what happens when we take a picture without the reflector:

The face of the model looks a little dark, and it’s hard to see her eyes. Let’s add a small reflector:

Now we have a nice illuminated face. It’s just that simple, with a small reflector we direct the light to fill in the shadows. This particular day was overcast and that was good because the clouds acted like a huge soft box making the sunlight very nice, soft and even.

Another images using a big reflector. Thanks to Joey Quintero for your help!

Since we were a lot of people with just two models….

… Jennifer and David from B&H decided to model for us…

And for those (myself included) who didn’t want to get into the mass of photographers to take pictures of the models, we decided to model for ourselves using a big (42” or bigger) umbrella with a SB-600 attached.
I was using my D40x with the SB-800 to trigger the flash; cameras above the D40x have TTL capabilities on the camera and can trigger the SB-600 with the pop-up flash with no problem. I needed the external flash to trigger the other one. Here are a couple of portraits of the photographers taken with this equipment:

Trying split lighting here:

And butterfly with Rebeca (need to work a little more on this one):

A fellow photographer, Fabian Cambero from Venezuela, was able to come to the shoot and he was brave enough to go into the crowd of photographers and take really nice pictures of the models; you can see his pictures here.

Here is a picture of me taken by Fabian Cambero with natural light:

Arianys Wilson Photography