Every year around bonfire night, almost without a fail, we go to see the spectacular fireworks display at Verulamium Park in St Albans. I remember going there 8 years ago, 8.5 months pregnant, Emily doing somersaults in my tummy and it took me forever to walk home back up Holywell Hill! It was much easier this year, the children are older and they don’t demand we keep their ears covered up anymore to watch the fireworks! It was super cold last night so we set off in our ski gear (maybe we overdid it a little!), arrived on our favourite spot in the park just in time for the start of the Fireworks Extravaganza!
It took me a while to work out the best settings for this, in the end I went for ISO 1000, F/2 and SS 1/100sec and tried to keep the camera as steady as possible. I didn’t have a tripod with me but if I did I could also have captured this quite differently, with a higher aperture number and a much longer shutter speed to capture trails of motion as the fireworks explode. It is worth taking a little head torch with you so you can see and adjust the settings on your camera easily. Also, a wide angle lens could be very useful to capture more of the fireworks, I felt a bit frustrated at time that I couldn’t fit everything in with my 50mm lens, I wanted to capture silhouettes of the audience to give it a sense of scale and a “close encounters of the third kind” feel!
For this one I purposefully set the lens out of focus (focussing on the night sky I think it focussed on the infinite) to get a more abstract bokeh shot:
Thanks for looking!