- Hey guys, what is goin' on. In this video?
We're talkin' about how you get better
footage when you're out shooting fireworks.
(upbeat music)
- All right, so today is the Fourth of July,
that is why I'm wearin' my Fourth of July onesie
gettin' ready to go do some barbecuing,
play some volleyball at the beach because
it's amazing outside and we're gonna
go enjoy our time down at the beach.
Tonight is fireworks, so I'm gonna
go out and I'm gonna shoot some fireworks.
But I do have some tips for you guys when
you're goin' out and shooting fireworks wherever you are,
celebrating the Fourth of July if you're here in the U.S.
So recently, I did another video on
how you shoot in low light and
a lot of those principles actually apply
to shooting fireworks, so if you haven't
seen that video already, I'll link it
down in the description below.
Make sure you go check that one out
after this video because all those
concepts come into play when you're shooting fireworks.
So one of the things you gotta think about is
you got these big, bright flashes in the sky,
and then you have a lot of things on the ground.
Well, when it comes to shooting fireworks,
you're never gonna expose for the
brightness of the fireworks because
when the flash happens it's so bright
no matter what, it's gonna overexpose the sensor.
But then it's gonna get really dark really fast,
and you're gonna have those streams of color.
So you're actually not gonna be
closing down your camera very much.
You might think you wanna shoot it
like an F22 or an F16 so that less light
enters the lens and it's actually the opposite.
You're gonna be shooting pretty wide open,
you're gonna shoot at your 180 degree shutter angle,
and you're actually gonna bump up
your ISO to something that is usable.
So you obviously don't wanna go too high with your ISO,
you don't wanna get super noisy images.
But to get footage in low light you have to
have your ISO at like an eight hundred,
16 if you're really pushin' it,
sometimes 32 if your camera doesn't
introduce a ton of noise into the image.
Last night, there was a special
fireworks here in Santa Monica
so I got a chance to shoot some footage for you guys,
and I shot this all on my 50 millimeter and
my eight millimeter and I shot at a two eight,
180 degree shutter and a 3200 ISO.
I also shot some of this footage
at 360 because I'm not moving the camera around a lot,
so you're not gonna see a lot of that
motion blur like it's introduced when
you shoot at a 360 degree shutter.
Now if you're thinking about it
in terms of shutter speed, it would be like
double that of your frame raise, so 148th or 1/60th.
Okay, another major point is to not use auto focus.
Turn the auto focus off because
your camera is going to be hunting around
trying to focus on something in the frame.
You gotta use your manual focus and
if you need to bump up your camera's
exposure like as high as it can possibly go
to be able to get the focus points
while it's dark out, that's the way you gotta do it.
But grab your focus points and
get your exposure locked in because
you want to shoot this manually.
You want nothing on auto because with the
big bright flashes, with everything that's
going on in the frame, the focus is
never gonna be on, it's gonna be hunting around.
So a couple more things is that
a tripod is really helpful when
you're shooting fireworks, it makes it
a lot easier so that you can frame up
your shot and not miss when the fireworks happen.
You're not gonna be able to see where the
fireworks are going to go off until they go off.
So you can set your frame, justify it based on
some of the other fireworks that have gone off and
let it sit so that you make sure that your framing is right.
So slow motion looks awesome for fireworks,
but time lapses also look really good as well.
So play with your speed, don't shoot
everything in real time, shoot some slow motion.
Slow motion just looks so good on fireworks
because you really see the streaking of the
different effects that come out with
each different style of firework,
but also time lapse looks really cool and
you can do some cool stuff with that.
So play around with all different types of speed.
And my last tip would be to change
your lenses and go with different focal lengths.
Sometimes you're gonna wanna be super wide and
you wanna see the surrounding areas because
when you give some context to where the
fireworks are, it makes it more interesting.
If you foreground elements, you put people there,
it's more interesting than just watching the fireworks.
So get some awesome footage of just the
fireworks in the sky, you know completely
blacked out some exploding fireworks,
but then play around with using foregrounded elements.
Use people in the foreground or use objects and
see what you can come up with to
make the shots more interesting.
All right guys, I hope you have an
awesome time shooting fireworks
wherever you're at whether it's
Fourth of July here or you're somewhere else that
has an awesome firework display.
I hope these tips help you capture an amazing,
I hope these tips help you capture an amazing show.
Like I said earlier, make sure you
go check out my other video of
how to shoot in low light, those tips
all apply to shooting with fireworks.
So go watch that video and you'll get
a lot more in depth in how you shoot in low light.
All right guys, I'm gonna go enjoy
my Fourth of July and I will see you on the next one.
(inspiring music)
♪ Because time stood still right there ♪
♪ Time stood still right there ♪