2009 hasn’t been a very good year for firework photography as I keep missing opportunities to photograph them. For the second year in a row I missed out on the Blackpool International Competition, but finally last night I got to see and photograph fireworks. Big thanks goes to Daisy (Kay’s flatmate) for introducing us to Matt (also huge thanks for Matt]. He let me set up my camera and tripod on his first floor window ledge looking directly over the Race Course buildings, which meant that I am able to bring you the above firework photograph.

It was a special day on the Saturday evening in the Swiss calender and so Andras had brought one large Volcano firework to celebrate. Like me he loves fireworks and this was evidently his favourite. I suspect this was partly due to the fact it lasted around 30 seconds, which is a long time and great value for money in the world of fireworks! Still it gave a great shape and this was certainly the best firework photograph I captured that evening.

As you can imagine there are a lot of problems with photographing fireworks, but the thing that I struggle with the most is getting the whole explosion into the frame without cropping off the edges. The long exposures are quite easy to control with the camera supported by a tripod. The above photograph was one of the few that includes the full explosion. It was taken at the British Firework Championship event in Buile Hill Park. This was one of half a dozen around the UK and is the largest, competitive fireworks display in the UK.

Last night I got the Metrolink tram down to Salford to watch the British Firework Championship event in Buile Hill Park. This was one of half a dozen around the UK and is the largest, competitive fireworks display in the UK. Unfortunately I am unsure how many others I will be able to photograph (if any) but with this event being so close and free it was an opportunity not to be missed. There were three displays from Star Fireworks, Highlight Pyrotechnics, and Celebration Displays each lasting ten minutes. For those interested I did not stay to find out the winner, but from what I saw and heard from the crowd Celebration Displays (if they went last) were the best, the above photo was from the last display.

Obviously, to take this photograph my camera was on a tripod and it was the first firework event where I used my new cable remote shutter release to fire the camera. Another first was that this time I had the camera set to fully manual mode. The settings for the photograph above were an exposure time of one second at f/10 with the exposure bias at -2/3 EV. The lens was at 18mm and the ISO was 100. This is one of half a dozen great captures (compared to the rest anyway) and over the three ten minute long displays more than 500 exposures were captured (well over half have already been deleted) but it was all worth it to be able to bring you more firework photography that I enjoy so much.