The Hidden Glasgow Forums

anyone else going? I'm here with my camera...

Can trust you ma laddie to get some good ones in though. Peetabix got a good B/W the other night there from Garthamlock.

No breeze this evening so i got a lot of smokey images.

You've got some really nice crisp shots there. Did you have to tweak your blacks to get that? What settings did you take them on? It was good fun but we were on the other side of the river, behind the distillery, to get a better view so we missed out on a lot of the atmosphere from the music.

Good photies you two. I Have tried and tried for fire work shots but mine always look shit.

We met a guy setting up the most expensive-looking tripod and asked him what settings he went for - he said 2 seconds at f/8 on ISO 200. I tried a few settings either side of that but they were rubbish - he obviously knew his stuff. It was easy to either make it too dark or get too much blur as the fireworks fell or smudged on top of each other.

scottwramsay wrote:You've got some really nice crisp shots there. Did you have to tweak your blacks to get that? What settings did you take them on?]

I was play around the setting most about 2-4 second anywhere between F7.1-F11 I did darken the shadows quickly using picasa (free from google) which made a massive difference.

Cheers Rick

scottwramsay wrote:We met a guy setting up the most expensive-looking tripod and asked him what settings he went for - he said 2 seconds at f/8 on ISO 200. I tried a few settings either side of that but they were rubbish - he obviously knew his stuff. It was easy to either make it too dark or get too much blur as the fireworks fell or smudged on top of each other.

It's always good to experiment. I checked my favourite shots from last year to see what settings I'd used, and they were all 4 seconds at f/11 on ISO 200. Used that as a starting point:



Then went to ten seconds to see if I could get some more light on the crowd:

(ended up overexposing the bloody crowd and pulling it back in post)

I liked the multiple bursts, but wasn't keen on the orange that was creeping in from the overcast sky, so stayed at 10s but went down to f/13 and ISO 100:


Later I tried bumping the ISO and going to aperture priority (at -1EV) just for a lark:

1/10s, f/7.1, ISO 1000


1/4s, f/7.1, ISO 640

At those speeds the smoke becomes a much more interesting part of the picture. Quite nice, I thought.

So yeah. I ended up binning a lot that didn't turn out at all (ISO 50? Maybe not) but I got a more interesting and varied set of photos than I would have done had I stuck to a single setting.

They've all been Lightroomed/Potatoshopped, of course. Making a duplicate layer in PS and setting it to overlay or soft light works out a treat.

Found the lack of any breeze made it very smokey and difficult to get any really good shots, here one i took at the 2007 display.

Cracking photies, everybody!

I've only had one go at fireworks, a couple of months ago, and the hurried reading I did beforehand suggested that you use aperture to control the brightness, and shutter speed to set the trail length. It seemed to work ok in itself after a bit of trial and error, but predicting when the things actually went off was a nightmare...

Well done folks