Sleeping Beauty's Castle

One of the things that I’ve always wanted to try is to capture shots of fireworks at night.  In the past, I’ve used a point and shoot camera to try to capture the Fourth of July.  Needless to say, the fireworks were underwhelming at best.  Now that I have more gear, and wisdom gleaned from the internet (oh, the magic), I set off with my father-in-law one evening after work to try to capture fireworks at Disneyland.  We set up shop at the top of Main Street, right in front of the train station (and actually, upstairs on the raised platform, rather than at street level).

The image at right represents where I thought the fireworks would appear based on my previous experiences at Disneyland as a gawking observer, rather than as an aspiring photographer.  In actuality, from the top of Main Street, it appears the fireworks are bursting from nowhere near the castle.

One reason we set up shop in front of the Main Street train station was because we knew we had to accommodate a tripod, and I could not imagine trying to set one up in the middle of the throngs of people that sardine together every night to watch the fireworks from the castle.  In retrospect, the train station turned out to be an okay view, although I might someday try to scout out a better spot.  From where we were, a flagpole tended to obstruct line of sight.

Colorful bursts

For those of you interested, Disneyland did admit us with a tripod and a full backpack of camera gear.  From what I’ve read, at one point they had an unofficial policy of turning away tripods, however as of late, the general consensus is that they are no longer doing this.

Single burst

As for the gear, here is what I used: Canon EOS 50D, Canon 70-300 IS zoom, Manfrotto tripod and ballhead, Phottix remote trigger and 32GB compact flash card.

Purple bursts with "rockets"

Let me say just a couple of words about the equipment:

1. Any DSLR would probably work equally well.  About the only requirement is the ability to shoot a frame with a shutter speed on the order of 2-5 seconds.
2. The 70-300 turned out to be a mistake, though I didn’t know that until the fireworks started, and at that point, I didn’t want to swap lenses in complete darkness.  As I mentioned above, my expectations were that the fireworks would appear above the castle, and I thought I had this framed well with the 70-300.  In fact, from the top of Main Street, it appears they are coming from far left of the castle, and much closer than expected.  I shot everything at 70 mm, and found this often was too long.  The rule that I should have remembered – you can always crop a wider shot, but you can’t add back in stuff you missed because of a long lens.  If I were shooting again from this location, I would leave my 17-55 IS on the camera.
3. A good tripod is a necessity.
4. A remote trigger is almost a necessity.  (You could probably get away with using the camera’s timer, but you’d capture far fewer images (and fewer keepers as a result).
5. I know everyone always says to use several smaller compact flash cards instead of one gigantic one, but in this case, there was a method to my madness.  You see, I had read that some people try to time the burst of the fireworks and coordinate the press of the shutter.  Not me – my strategy was more based on the law of large numbers.  I wanted to be able to fire off a new shot as soon as the previous one had been written to the CF card.  This meant taking a picture approximately every 5 to 10 seconds over the course of a 20 minute show.  I needed a ginormous card.  (For the record, at an important event like a wedding, I’d favor many small cards too.)

White and purple bursts

Virtually all of my images are shot at 2.5 seconds, f10, ISO 320 and 70 mm focal length.  I’ll admit, ISO 320 was an odd choice.  It was left over from something I was shooting earlier in the day, and wasn’t a conscious decision.  It seemed to work well enough, but had I been thinking about it, I think I would have set my ISO a little lower, and compensated with either a little longer shutter or a little wider aperture.

Favorite image from the evening

I did very little post-processing to these images.  About the only thing I adjusted in Lightroom – I pushed the blacks from their default of 5 to approximately 15 to 20, depending on the image.  I found this minimized some of the appearance of the smoke as well as some of the light pollution from the adjoining city.

Why didn't I have a little wider lens mounted?

All in all, shooting fireworks was only intimidating until I actually tried it.  It was just a matter of finding some settings that seemed to work (the shutter speed and aperture were in the ballpark of suggestions I found on the internet), and then pressing the shutter release over and over and over again.  As I mentioned, about the only thing that didn’t work out well was the focal length of the lens – a 17-55 or 24-70 probably would have been ideal.  Finally, if you’re interested in trying your hand at fireworks, Disneyland is about as good a place as any to do it.  They put on a good show, it lasts between 15 and 20 minutes, and if what you come away with isn’t quite what you thought it would be, well, there’s another show the following night.

Here are a few more from the evening …

Nice bursts

Shooting out in all directions

Second favorite of the evening

Again - tightly framed

Last one !