Fireworks

On Australia Day evening I sat on the beach at Mornington with the family to watch the fireworks.  I haven’t done much fireworks photography before, but I took my camera and tri-pod anyway.  I wasn’t sure what the ideal settings would be, but I thought I’d have a go.

Stuffed it up

I stuffed up my fireworks photography in a few ways;

• I thought the pyrotechnics would be launched from the pier, but they were actually set-up further out on a barge, so my camera was pointing in the wrong direction and missed the start of the display.
• Not refocusing after rushing to re-aim the camera towards the fireworks resulted in some blurry light streaks.
• After quickly pointing the camera in the right direction, the horizon was no longer level.
• At the time I thought 30 second exposures, either single shot or compositions, would be great to capture several explosions and fill the sky. The reality was a big blob of blown out whiteness at the launch point

In the end, I managed to get a couple of ok shots using a two second exposure.  Nothing great, just ok.

Instagram

Afterwards I uploaded the shots to my phone and did some quick adjustments in the Instagram app and published three of them.  Those fireworks photos don’t look too bad on the small iPhone screen, but I know they are actually crap because they’re heavily cropped and either under or over exposed.

Since then I haven’t even bothered to upload the photos to my computer, let alone process them in Lightroom.

So is this photography cheating, because the only post processing and publishing is done on the Instagram app?