As regular followers of my website will know, I’ve been renovating a house for the past 18 months. I kept many of the wooden pallets large items were delivered on and have used several to make planters for the garden. However, some of the pallets weren’t suitable or simply haven’t been used and have been sitting for many months in my driveway.

My village has well attended Guy Fawkes celebrations and I discovered that if you put wood outside your house on the morning of the bonfire it will be collected and burned. Fabulous! So all my large pallets, plus some other large pieces of wood and a tree stump, were duly placed at the end of my drive this weekend and a nice group of men and a tractor arrived to remove them.

I have to admit I’m not a huge fan of bonfire night. I don’t mind the bonfire, especially one which is constructed on the day and therefore doesn’t become a home to wildlife (particularly hedgehogs), but I’m quite anti the fireworks. Living in a rural area I know it can terrify both wildlife, farm and domestic animals like horses, and the loud bangs also used to have my little dog quivering under the bed in terror. However for now they’re allowed and, having never photographed fireworks, I decided to have a go.

I looked up the recommended camera settings before I left the house, which were to use manual focus set to infinity, a low ISO (eg 100), a mid range aperture like F/8 and continuous shooting mode. However, after taking my first set of pictures I realised these settings didn’t work for me – the images were way over-exposed and the explosions were blurred as my shutter speed wasn’t fast enough.

After quickly playing around I settled on:
– manual focus set to infinity
– ISO 1600 (yes, it did cause noise which I dealt with in editing afterwards)
– F/5.6 (a sharp aperture for my make of camera)
– I dialled the exposure compensation down by 2 stops to remove much of the ambient light
– continuous shooting mode (which on my Olympus gives me 11 frames/second when set to low)
-hand held (no tripod)
These settings gave me a shutter speed of 1/20th which froze the motion of the fireworks well.

It was such an enjoyable night. The weather was perfect: dry with a clear starry sky, no wind and very mild temperatures. There were hundreds of people in attendance and stalls with food and drink. The kids were all so excited and their little faces as they watched the fireworks were adorable. The display lasted a full 15 minutes and was excellent for a rural village, then the pub put on live music afterwards for the grown ups.

Considering I’d never tried firework photography before I think my images turned out OK. It’s not really something you can practice for and being as though I had to guess my camera settings on the spur of the moment I was just glad to get anything at all! I could have taken just the fireworks on their own but feel including the bonfire and the people outlined by the light from the fire gave context and added to the story. Time will tell whether camera club judges agree with me 😉