Always love shooting fireworks. The challenge every year is the fact that lighting changes so dramatically from location to location and you can’t really fine-tune your settings till the fireworks start going off. Over the years I have developed a starting setting group then dial in the numbers as I go. The settings are totally different if your using a flash, for example a flash would have blown out the people in foreground because I had the camera set up for available light, mood would have been totally lost. I switch between flash and no flash depending on if I need the face lite or not. In a perfect world I would have been set up on a tripod where I could lower my ISO to reduce grain but… the pace of trying to cover the event from a news standpoint doesn’t allow it.I could just see me taking out a kid or spectator lugging around a whopping tripod. So…all is hand-held and on the move.

My starting point for that is a 24-70 zoom, ISO 1600, F4.5@ a 60th of a second and just on the fly. Carefu lgoing below a 60th second shutter then you lose the crispness of the fireworks and they become motion blurs.