Periodically I attempt to photograph fireworks, usually around the 4th of July holiday. The Broadway High School Parent Teacher Student Organization holds a fireworks event at the Broadway High School every year in June, usually on the third Saturday. We can see these fireworks from our front porch and I have photographed them previously. Recently, some trees between our development and the high school have grown and now obstruct much of the fireworks except the highest ones, so I have not photographed them in the past several years.
This year I heard that a good place to view Harrisonburg’s fireworks (if they are held at Westover Park) is James Madison University’s Warsaw Avenue parking deck adjacent to the Forbes Center for the Performing Arts. I went there to photograph them on Friday July 5 of this year – for details of the exposures please see the Technical Information section below the Photo Gallery.
Fireworks Image Gallery
The fireworks show lasted less than 15 minutes and the images in the gallery below are in the order they were taken. The first image is the Featured Image and is a Photoshop composite of five of the fireworks images. The captions of the images include the time and the length of the exposures. The last image shows the camera setup in the parking garage.
Technical Information
All these fireworks photos were taken from James Madison University’s Warsaw Avenue parking deck. I used a Canon R7 mirrorless camera with a Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8 DG OS HSM Sports Lens. This lens could barely fit between the safety bars above the parking deck wall and the 70mm minimum focal length was too long for the largest fireworks, so I was not able to capture some of the best fireworks. If I take fireworks photos from there again I would use my Sigma 24-105mm f/4 DG OS HSM lens instead.
Most fireworks photography articles suggest using exposure settings of ISO 200 and f/11 as a starting point and that is what I have used previously. However, one recent article suggested that individual firework streaks might be overexposed with these settings so I used ISO 100 and f/16 with manual focus for all these exposures and I was very pleased with the results.