Expo Park fireworks festival, Okinawa

Last Saturday was the Expo Park fireworks festival in Motobu. The event is famous for the spectacular display of 10,000 fireworks, followed shortly after by the island’s longest traffic jam.

A few quick tips for shooting fireworks:

Capture multiple bursts of fireworks in one image using a long exposure.

Don’t open the aperture too wide or have the ISO too high or the fireworks will show up as white. In the above shot I used ISO 100, F14 and 30 seconds.

Use a nice stable tripod.

Shooting only the fireworks in the sky is one option, but including some other visual elements that are unique to that particular event may make for a stronger image. The ocean and the tiny palm trees beneath the fireworks are included in the first shot to show scale and place. However the torii gate at Itsukushima is perhaps the best background I’ve had for a fireworks image.

Itsukushima Fireworks Festival near Hiroshima