SteemitPhotoChallenge Entry 'Celebrations' / How to photograph sparklers

Bright colors lighting up the darkness, the distinct smell of sulfur, happy people everywhere...I'm talking about fireworks. We have plenty of reasons to celebrate throughout the year, but we don't always break out the fireworks. In most countries it's even illegal to posess or use unless it's new years eve. There is one type of fireworks though, we can buy almost anywhere anytime...and they are lots of fun to use in photos!

For this photo I used iso 1250 - f/4 - 1/60 and a focal length of 62mm, taken with a Nikon D7200 / Sigma 17-70

The sparkler is cheap, fun and relatively safe to use. You can hold them in your hands no problem, but of course be warned that they will get extremely hot nonetheless, so be careful! 

First things first

It's very hard and quite frankly not very safe to photograph these with one hand while holding it in the other. Also they are a bit boring when just planted somewhere, so you should get someone to hold them up for you to photograph.

Done, what do I need?

You could use a mobile phone to photograph sparklers but I don't recommend it. You would need to photograph in dark surroundings with strong contrasting, moving light. If you would want to try, you would need an app to control the shutterspeed but that also has its limitations on a mobile phone due to movement... Hence my recommendation of using a DSLR or mirrorless camera. Also depending on what kind of photo you would want to make, you could need the help of a tripod but that's only if you would want really specific shots with lots of light-trails.

Okay, I got my camera ready

Good, now get your sparklers out and light one. You would want to use M (manual) for full control over the settings. It's quite hard getting the lighting right so be sure to have a decent amount of sparklers ready cause the first photos will definitely fail and even when you have the settings down, every photo will be very different due to the wild nature of the sparks.

Things to consider

• Naturally for low light situations, you would want to have a low f/ value for your aperture to let as much light in as possible. However, because your photos are to be in focus on detailed positions it's not a bad idea to go up to f/5 max to get the entire hand + sparkler in focus.
  
  
• If you use a slow shutterspeed you will get more sparks and more light in your photo. Due to the extremely wild nature of these sparks you wouldn't want to go too slow otherwise the screen will be filled with sparks and you couldn't see the rest, like the actual hand holding the sparkler. Also because of the slow shutterspeed it would be very hard to hold the camera steady enough without a tripod. In my experience, anything slower than 1/40 is going to be really hard to hold steady, to be sure I went 1/60 for my photos.
  
  
• So the aperture and shutterspeed are pretty much determined now, yet if you try to make some photos now they will most likely come out too dark. Our last resort solution would be to change the iso from its default 100 to anywhere where it's light enough, but without losing too much detail in the photo. Just try and go a little higher each time until you got it right. Don't forget though, depending on your camera, even though they can go to very high iso's, it won't be good for the quality of the photo and that won't always be visible on the camera's screen. Be cautious not to go too high.

My end results

Out of all the photos I took, these and the one above were my favorites:

This photo was taken with iso 1000 - f/3.8 and 1/60. The focal length was 52mm, taken with a Nikon D7200 / Sigma 17-70

This photo is a little lighter, due to the increased iso of 3200 - f/3.8 and 1/60. The focal length was the same at 52mm, taken with a Nikon D7200 / Sigma 17-70

As you can see, I added a little color enhancement to each photo for dramatic purposes. 

I hope you liked the photos and found this guide useful!

The creation of this post was inspired by this contest created by @jamtaylor, give him a follow to stay updated on the Steemitphotochallenge contests