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So you flip through Instagram and find all of these amazing pictures. Christmas, birthdays, St. Patrick’s Day, they all look amazing. Then you get to 4th of July and noticed that your pictures fall a bit flat. It seems that the fireworks don’t translate very well from the sky to the camera on your phone, but your friend’s pics look incredible! You don’t want to spend money on a professional photography camera just to take pictures of fireworks, but it seems that your phone just doesn’t do them justice. Well, Pro Fireworks has good news. As it happens, you can take some pretty amazing pictures of fireworks with your cell phone. In fact, you might need to only change one common, yet unknown, mistake to fix it. Read on for the tips. Your Instagram and Facebook feeds well thank you, and your friends will be jealous!
4 Tips for Taking Amazing Smart Phone Firework Pictures
1. Turn off your flash. Remember, the flash feature on your phone only lights 10-15 feet of visible area. So, you will have amazing pictures of your friends faces, with very dark, underexposed pictures of fireworks overhead. If you want to light your friends and capture everything in the moment, put the light source behind you. Then turn your flash off and snap the pic. That will give you a great fireworks picture.
2. Set your exposure to long. Remember, the longer you keep your shutter open, the more light gets a chance to expose itself to your phone’s photo sensor. So how do you apply this principle to your smartphone? Simple, try to set the exposure rate as long as you can. You may not be able to set it for a full exposure length of 5 to 10 seconds, but anything longer than the standard shutter exposure will drastically help. Also, you can purchase third-party apps for your phone to increase the shutter exposure for a measly $0.99. Just be sure to download them a day or so in advance so you have a chance to play around with them a bit before you go live on the big night!
3. Edit your picture a little bit. Keep in mind, no one is going to take a perfect fireworks picture with their phone, not even in Michigan. To help make your picture pop, play around with the editing features in your photo options. You can adjust contrast features, make shadows a bit brighter, modify things like photo saturation or temperature and even crop the photo if need be. All of these small tweaks will add up to one amazing picture.
- Kill the HDR. Remember I said there was one thing you could do that could fix it? This is it. This is the one tip that could change everything for your fireworks photo mishaps. Turn off the high dynamic range setting on your phone’s camera and you should notice an almost instant difference. This seems counter intuitive because you would think the high dynamic range would bring out all of the rich colors and fireworks. That’s true, but only if the subject of the HDR photo is stationary. Remember, fireworks move, and change shape while they move, so HDR can’t make sense of what it is capturing. The result is a fireworks picture that looks very bland. Turn it off and get much better results!Use these tips and you will be snapping pics like a professional in no time. Your social media feeds will look amazing and you will have some great memories as well! Could you do us a favor now? If this post was helpful, like and share with all of your photo bug friends!
