Shooting fireworks is quite similar to photographing lightning, we are not waiting for the fireworks to go off then to fire off our shutter rather using an open shutter and let the fireworks come to us.

First set your ISO to 100 or even 80 if you have it and select an aperture of around f/16 now take a light reading of the sky. Performing a light reading is to ensure we obtain a rich sky, if you are unable to obtain a reading as a rule of thumb for summer try an exposure of around 15 seconds and for winter around 60 seconds.

If you are able to gain a light reading you will need to reduce it by a quarter, this ensures you are going to have a nice deep sky. In many low light or night photography situations often you would select your cameras NR function, with fireworks you must ensure this is turned off.

The setup

You have your camera set-up on your tripod, ISO 100 selected and the camera in B or bulb setting with your f/16 aperture. Now have something with you that you can cover the lens with, personally I fashioned a closed short tube that snugly goes over the very end of the lens, you could use a piece of stiff card it really does not matter just as long as you can block the light out completely.

For the right lens try a medium focus zoom lens, and experiment with varied focal lengths. You will want a stop watch or a watch you can keep an eye on the seconds easily. If you are using an exposure of say 60 seconds every time you cover the lens you need to discard that time.

Now it is just a technique of waiting for the fireworks to go off and taking your piece of card away from the lens and counting the seconds for the exposure, you will often get many bursts to a single exposure.

With this method you can capture the flight trails and the actual explosion and it allows you to capture the full brilliance of a fireworks display.