Saturday evening I went to Les Grands Feux du Casino du Lac-Leamy as one of the volunteer photographers for the event. It’s the first time that I’ve been an “official” photographer for something since my days of being a photographer for the yearbook in high school.

Being the first day of the festival, the team of photographers were asked to fan out and take pictures of everything from the signs to the tents to the chairs and also the people. And, of course, raison d’être for the event, the fireworks.

I’ve written about taking photos of fireworks a couple of times in the past and I’ve even taken pictures at Les Grands Feux, though not as an official event photographer.

There are a couple of different approaches I use when taking pictures of fireworks, which depend on the type of camera I have and whether I can use a tripod.

As I was fortunate enough to have an unobstructed front row seat, I set up my camera on a tripod and framed the scene prior to the beginning of the show. I focused on the barge where the fireworks are set off from and then turned off the autofocus on the lens so that it wouldn’t "hunt" for something to focus on when the fireworks started. Shooting in raw mode, I chose an ISO speed of 100. This would allow longer exposures while avoiding saturating the CCD sensor. For a shutter speed, I selected "bulb", which means that the shutter would be open for as long as I held it open with my remote. (Fortunately, I didn’t have to actually hold it open because I was using a wireless remote — I just had to press the button to open the shutter and press it again to close it.)

And then I waited for the start of the show.

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