How to take fireworks pictures on July 4

(credit: Matt Swider / The Shortcut)

• 🎛️ Go full manual on your smartphone or camera for better and cleaner photos

• 🎆 Take long exposures by lowering your ISO and shutter speed

• 🎥 Increase your aperture to f4 or f5.6 so you can capture more of the frame in focus

• 🪜 Bring a tripod and remote trigger for the steadiest long exposure images

• 🥳 Read on for more tips and don’t forget to have fun

With summer now in full swing, there are outdoor celebrations around the globe that call for the night sky to explode in color. Taking photos of fireworks might be as easy as taking your smartphone and snapping away, but if you want to take your photos to the next level, we’ve got a quick set of tips for you.

It only takes a bit of planning and foreknowledge to create that perfect and memorable photo. You can apply these tips to shooting with either a smartphone or a camera. These will make your photos look professional, detailed, and cleaner.

Most importantly, though, don’t forget to enjoy the fireworks! Don’t get bogged down in the photographic process and end up staring at your camera all night.

(credit: Matt Swider / The Shortcut)

🤳 Camera or smartphone. Why not both? You can capture excellent fireworks photos from both your smartphone and camera. Smartphone cameras have seen a massive jump in quality, and apps like ProCamera will fully unlock their advanced manual controls. You can apply all the settings with standalone cameras, and you can capture higher-resolution and a wider dynamic range with a camera, too.

👣 Get closer. Get right up to the front of the line if you want to get the best firework photos. Even with the longest smartphone and camera zoom lenses, it never hurts to get closer to the fireworks by zooming in with your feet. This means walking right up to the fences, shoreline, rooftops, or anywhere else you can safely get near the action.

(credit: Kevin Lee / The Shortcut)

🎛️ Go full manual.  Your smartphone camera is fully capable of taking shots of fireworks, but taking control of the manual settings will let you produce even better ones. Both iOS and Android have pro modes that unlock their full potential. Also, don’t be afraid of that M-mode on your camera dial either.

🔻 Lower sensitivity, lower shutter speed. Lowering your ISO sensitivity and shutter speed. Lower ISO helps reduce the noise that pops up against the dark skyline. Longer shutter speeds, meanwhile, will let you capture more streams of light falling from fireworks that have gone off. By setting your exposure to go on for a second or longer (nothing over five seconds, though), you’ll be able to capture the full arc of the fireworks shooting in the sky, exploding in the air, and streaking across the sky in one frame.

🎥 Expand your focus zone. Close down your camera aperture to f4 or f5.6 if you want to capture more fireworks in focus. As the aperture number increases, the iris in the lens closes, which widens your depth of field. This allows you to capture the whole scene in sharp detail. Just be cautious about increasing the aperture too much, as this can introduce diffraction issues and moiré patterns caused by overlapping details.

(credit: Kevin Lee / The Shortcut)

🪜 Support is key. A little mobile tripod can also help you take sharper shots of the pyrotechnics. With the extra stable accessory, you can take photos that last for multiple seconds to capture more dramatic images of fireworks.

🔘 Remote trigger. While tripods help prevent camera shake during a long exposure, there’s still a chance of introducing accidental movement when pressing down the shutter button. You can avoid this by connecting a Bluetooth remote, plugging in a cable release, IR trigger, or controlling your camera over Wi-Fi.

🌒 Cover your camera. It might sound antithetical to cover your camera while taking a photo, but it can actually help you take cleaner images. You can block your camera with a folder, book, lens cap, or whatever you have on you to block any fireworks you don’t want in your shot. This technique also works well if you wish to capture the initial burst from fireworks going off, rather than any of the trailing raindrops.

(credit: Kevin Lee / The Shortcut)

📸 Flash off. Turn off that camera flash. It’s an entirely useless pea shooter, providing no light at all to illuminate the miles of darkness separating you from the fireworks. People around you will also be grateful that you’re not flashing them with every snap. Lastly, your camera will also run longer with the flash off.

🔭 Real zoom only. Skip using any digital zoom on your smartphone or camera. While it might seem like a sensible replacement for an optical zoom lens, in reality, the digital sensor is only cropping the image to make it larger. In other words, you’re actually shedding resolution for a picture with more noise and grain.

🧪 Experiment. Alternatively, instead of getting the perfect shot, long exposures also open up a world of opportunities to experiment with light painting. You could try your hand at moving the camera in concentric circles or distinct shapes and letters.

And with that, you're ready to start shooting fireworks at night. So get out there and have fun shooting!

Kevin Lee is The Shortcut’s Creative Director. Follow him on Twitter @baggingspam.