So, you are sitting there, enjoying the show and you whip out your i-phone to take a photo of the fireworks. But, it’s blurry, unfocused and now your determined to get at least one for you Twitter, or Facebook account to post. Well, let me give you my fireworks photos with a i-phone tips, to help you capture something worthy.
1. If possible, a tripod, but if not available, a friend’s shoulder or table or top of a chair to hold steady
2. Your phone’s camera automatically tries to find an object on which to focus. And when presented with a black featureless sky, the camera doesn’t know what to do. By putting your camera in “landscape” mode, you’ll be presetting the focus to infinity and narrowing the lens opening, which keeps both near and far objects in focus.
3. High ISO will crank up the sensitivity of your phone’s camera so it can see details in the dark. However, the fireworks themselves are quite bright.
So, to avoid overexposure and reduce noise, take your camera out of Auto ISO and change the setting to ISO 100 or even lower.
The ISO setting is usually found under the main menu or in the settings within the camera app.
4. Turn off the flash and go for some creativity.
5. Give HDR a try: Take advantage of your iPhone’s HDR (High Dynamic Range) setting.
An HDR image combines a series of three photographs, each one shot at a different exposure:
- underexposed (darker)
- overexposed (lighter)
- properly exposed (you guessed it, somewhere in between)
The best parts of these images are then combined into one photo, bringing out the details of both the shadows and the highlights that would normally be lost in a single exposure photo, even though they are visible to the human eye.
With fireworks, HDR might help to pick up the trails and details that a single image may not capture. Take a few and see what you think. Also, make sure you keep the original image so you can compare it to the HDR version. You can allow for this in Settings > Photos & Camera > Keep Normal Photo
6. The iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s can capture a burst of photos when you hold the shutter down. As soon as you hear the firework shoot off, you can hold down the shutter and take a burst of photos back to back to back as long as you hold the shutter. The video below walks through how this works.