The general tips for fireworks shooting apply, i.e.
- Long time exposure with a small aperture, to capture the beautiful trails of fireworks;
- A tripod, or other kinds of camera support needed for long time exposure.
One more additional tip: You might want to hold the camera vertically instead of horizontally, because fireworks go upward and usually do not expand very wide horizontally. But this is not a strict rule. It depends.
To shoot fireworks with a CoolPix 995, usually you will need to do the following:
- Set the exposure mode to M (manual).
- Set the ISO to 100 (lowest ISO available on CoolPix 995).
- Set the focus mode to infinity, using the focus mode button.
- When the fireworks begin, adjust the zoom so that the fireworks have the desired size in the frame.
- Set the aperture to the smallest available for the lens focal length (or zoom) that you are using. You should check the aperture constantly during the shooting, because it can easily be changed by mistake, or you may change it accidentally. Notice that a change of zoom will usually cause a change in aperture.
- Set the shutter speed to Bulb, so you can control the exposure time, which is usually long for fireworks shooting and varies from shot to shot.
- Turn OFF noise reduction (NR) -- well, it depends; read on. From what I read from this digital camera forum post [local copy], when NR is on, the camera takes twice the time you intend it to use to take a picture. Since so many fireworks come one after another so closely, you certainly do not want to miss, say, half of them.
When NR is on, it is said that a dark frame with the same exposure time as that of the actual shot is taken and then subtracted from the actual shot inside the camera, and the camera only output the final picture. Because the dark frame has almost the same noise, including the hot pixels if there are any on the CCD, as the original picture taken by the CCD, noises in the original picture are nearly cancelled after the subtraction.
I would say, take a few test shots with and without NR and check the result to see if you need NR. If you get only one or two hot pixels, maybe you can deal with them later in Photoshop. But if you get very noisy pictures and/or you really need clean pictures, then probably you want to turn on NR, because generally noises are better dealt with in camera than out of the camera.- Set the white balance to Fine, i.e. for daylight. You can also try other settings for different color effects, but I would avoid using Auto White Balance, although I have not tried that yet.
By the way, we all know that Auto White Balance does not work well on CoolPix 995. Nikon Europe has posted CoolPix 995 Firmware 1.7 to fix the Auto White Balance problem, but I have not tried that yet.Here is some of the experience that I had with my Fourth of July 2002 fireworks shooting. Proper exposure is still a problem. Because essentially there was no time (since there were so many fireworks and I did not want to miss any of them) for me to adjust the aperture for each shot, and it was dark in the night, and also because it was hard to decide the exposure time beforehand/predict the upcoming fireworks, I always kept the aperture at the smallest. Depending on how I wanted to capture each specific firework or a group of fireworks, I decided the exposure time for each shot as I watched the fireworks. Most of the time I used long time exposure in order to capture the beautiful trails. But some fireworks were just too bright, and others were relatively faint. So some shots were overexposed, while some others underexposed. I have not seen a solution to this problem. For now, I would say, it takes luck to get a beautiful and properly exposed fireworks shot, and there is indeed luck:-) So I just shot a lot, with most of which being a failure:-(
One last word about how to use bulb exposure, for real novices (like me when I tried to use bulb exposure for the first time but in a real shooting situation): Bulb exposure keeps the shutter open as long as the shutter release button is held down. So you need to hold down the shutter release button until you want to close the shutter. In my first attempt to shoot fireworks, also my first time to use bulb exposure, I realized that I did not really know how to use bulb exposure when the fireworks actually began. I thought I knew but it did not turn out that way. I was totally confused then that I was not able to figure it out at that time. Well, part of the reason was that I also turned on NR (see above).