Bonfire night 6th and 7th of November 2010

I was very much looking forward to Bonfire night this year for the chance to get out with my camera and experiment with taking pictures of Fire works. I was once told by a photographer that taking pictures of fire works is a great way to practice the technique used for taking pictures of lightening.

With that in mind I set my camera to M (Manual), with a 2 second shutter speed and an aperture of F8, grabbed my tripod and headed to Barking park's display on Saturday 6th November.

Here are the pictures that I took on Saturday at Barking Park

F8, 2 seconds

F8, 2 seconds

F8, 2 seconds

F8, 3 seconds

F8, 5 seconds

This one is my favourite

F8, 5 seconds

F8, 5seconds

F8, 5 seconds

F8, 4 seconds

F8, 2 seconds

Here are the pictures that I took on Sunday in Ashford

F5, 2.5 seconds

F5, 2.5 seconds

From the photos above I had a better day on the Saturday than the Sunday. I believe that F8 was a better aperture to use than F5. With F5 some of the fire works looked a little out of focus, but with F8 they looked great.

The Barking Park display did have more large explosion fire works than Ashford and this also helped with the quality of pictures.

F5, 3 seconds

I had seen this done on the web and wanted to give it a quick try. This picture looked good, although we only had one try and could not really change the location as I was already set up to take pictures of the fire works.

To make this better what I needed to do what to have a dark background without the lights and flash at the end of the shot to show off the subject who is waving the sparkler.