With the Fourth of July quickly approaching in the United States, photographers are getting ready to capture the magic of fireworks shows. If you want to nail some spectacular shots, you'll want to pay attention to a few key tips.
Photographer Vitor Schietti has created a new series of what he calls "impermanent sculptures" with miniature trees, or bonsai, as the subject with the goal of creating a visible "soul" of the plants.
New Hampshire native and photographer Ron Riseman placed a GoPro in the center of the barge that launched his town's Fourth of July fireworks celebration to provide a rare look at the show as seen from directly below it.
After a year indoors, this year’s Fourth of July fireworks are sure to be one of the highlights of summer. As most photographers know, the bright flash from fireworks against the dark night sky can make it tricky for both novice and experienced photographers to get a crystal-clear image of the spectacle.
As a photographer, when you produce a series of photos that goes viral and you close sales and license deals because of it, it is tempting to simply continue doing the same and hopefully keep receiving the attention you had in the first place.
There they were, a continuous, almost organized line of middle-aged men in various stages of unfolding tripods, mounting massive DSLRs on them, carefully aiming long lenses at indeterminate points in the darkening late evening sky. The LCDs lit their faces with a soft glow as they took test shots and talked among one another while fiddling with various items from their giant bags of equipment.
It’s 6:30PM on the 4th of July in Boston and I had just gotten off work—one of those poor souls whose job doesn’t care about national holidays. What’s worse is that all of my plans fell through; my roomies are at a private event on Google’s rooftop, the cute gal I’m dating is visiting family in Pittsburg, and all of my climber bum friends are up in New Hampshire making the most of a 4 day weekend.
I'm photographer David Johnson, and in this tutorial I'll be sharing how I shoot long-exposure photos of defocused fireworks.
This is awesome: Perfect_Tz flew a DJI Phantom 4 Pro camera drone through fireworks in Yunnan, China, reversed some of the footage, and set it to music. What resulted is this mesmerizing 3-minute short film titled, "Fireworks From Above."
Every summer in Japan, there are around 200 separate firework festivals, known as "Hanabi Taikai," which light up the sky in all sorts of colors. Japanese photographer Keisuke spent his time trekking to several of the shows this summer, an effort which allowed him to capture some mesmerizing firework photos.
On July 4th, photographer Dylan Schwartz watched the Independence Day firework shows in Los Angeles from an ultra wide-angle perspective. He climbed up over 5,000 feet and watched the brilliant shows across the entire L.A. basin from nearby Mount Wilson.
Here's a short and sweet 1-minute video by photographer Serge Ramelli containing some great tips for photographing fireworks.
This photo of July 4th celebrations in Los Angeles shows 10 minutes worth of fireworks compressed into a single photo.
My name is Adam van Alderwerelt, and I'm an amateur photographer living in Maui, Hawaii. Out here, there's only one location on the whole island that gets a permit from the local government to use aerial fireworks. Otherwise, it's completely illegal.
While most photographers captured this year's July 4th fireworks from below, Los Angeles-based photographer Aaron Keigher decided to find a different vantage point. He ventured up Mount Wilson, which rises over 5,000 feet above LA and create this dazzling time-lapse showing fireworks exploding across the landscape.
July 4th, 2014 was the day I got my first camera. Since then, I’ve been shooting local fireworks every year. After shooting the same firework show, the same way, for two years in a row, I decided this year it was time to do something different.
When the clock strikes midnight on New Year's Eve in the capital city of Lima, Peru, things get crazy. People shoot fireworks high into the sky from the streets and from the roots of buildings, creating a spectacular light show.
Photographer Jeff Cremer was in Lima this year and decided to use his camera drone to capture what the crazy fireworks display looks like from above. It "looks like the start of the air campaign in Iraq," Cremer says.
"Impermanent Sculptures" is a series of light-painting photos by Brazilian photographer Vitor Schietti. One of the interesting ideas found in the series is using fireworks to illuminate trees, resulting in photos that look like the leaves and branches are showering drops of light onto the ground.
Here's a photo shoot idea that you probably shouldn't try yourself. Photographer Jake Harsh recently did a wild photo shoot with the electro-pop band Hand of Hearts that involved 18 pounds of fireworks exploding around the three band members. The short behind-the-scenes video above shows what the intense shoot was like.
Photographer Calder Wilson recently did some experimentation by attaching fireworks to a drone and then flying it around in a long exposure photograph. The results are beautiful to look at.
Here’s something else to file under “Strange things people are doing with camera drones”: …
Last weekend, following the Fourth of July festivities, we shared a wonderful video of a Florida fireworks show as seen by a drone recording from within the show, perilously close to the colorful explosives. It wasn't the only such video to air post-Independence Day, however.
Others, including the video above shot by Robert Hartline in Nashville, TN also received tens of thousands of hits and, as it turns out, a bit more attention than he bargained for... Hartline is now being investigated by the FAA.
It's the fourth of July (on the off-chance didn't know), which means your Facebook feed is about to get flooded with firework photos from friends, family and professionals alike. But the firework photos in photographer Andrew Waits' series Boom City are unlike any others your likely to come across.
While most people take pictures of fireworks right after they explode, Waits took a different approach: he cut them open ahead of time to give us a peek at the insides.
Slow-motion footage is cool. Camera copter footage is cool. Fireworks are cool. So what happens when you mash all of them together into one video? No worries, your head won't explode (mostly because the GoPro this was probably filmed on doesn't do so hot in super low light) but the resulting video is a mesmerizing two and a half minute experience.
Sometimes a great photograph takes months of planning and patience to capture. Other times, you simply have to be in the right place at the right time, with your camera in tow and enough expertise to properly frame and capture an amazing moment. The photo above falls into the second category.
Forget Times Square, the place every photographer wishes they were on New Year's Eve 2014 (or is it 2013?) was Dubai. Why, you ask? Because this year the city set the world record for the largest fireworks show, and captured the entire thing on camera for posterity's sake.
Firework photographs are generally pretty uniform in their appearance: a dark sky, glowing sparks that are either points or lines depending on exposure time, and perhaps some views of the surrounding area. When photographing a major fireworks show last week, photographer Rob Shaw of BackFromLeave Photo wanted to do something different. He played around with various camera techniques and captured a set of firework images that is quite different than most of the images you'll see online.
In the past, we've shared a few creative ways to take your fireworks shots to the next level. Be it shooting hand-held long exposures for an abstract result or refocusing during a long-exposure, the results can be quite stunning.
The video above combines a couple of techniques we've shared before, making wonderful use of bokeh and the refocusing technique to create a mesmerizing minute of footage.
Yesterday we shared a beautiful photo showing 4th of July fireworks overlaid on a flash of lightning. After seeing that image, photographer Delilah Carter of DC Photography got in touch with us to say that she had also captured fireworks and lightning together this past weekend.
It wouldn't be 4th of July weekend without a few fireworks. We already share an incredibly lucky photograph taken by New Mexico-based photographer Jason Smith that captured lightning and fireworks in one, and now we have 1,500 more photos to share. No worries, they're mercifully arranged into a 59 second time-lapse.