I’ve always been a product of suburbia. I grew up outside of the city, flew across the country, and spent my early 20s and 30s in suburbia. Now, looking towards 50, I still find myself in suburbia. I’ve thought about going rural, and every so often, I dabble in the thought of becoming more urban. I’ve lived in the city three times in my life: college, a secondment at work, and now with my current partner.
I appreciate how intense and close everything is here in the city – particularly the events that come to town. My good friend Brinda describes it as “urbanity”: that intense amount of serendipity that shows up in the city. During late July, Vancouver invites teams of pyrotechnicians from all around the world to showcase their best fireworks in the Honda Celebration of Light. My current trip overlaps with Malaysia and Great Britain. The former I shot with an iPhone and the latter was taken with my partner’s Nikon D7500. Much like living in suburbia versus living in the city, the photography of these two events couldn’t have been more different.
In the iPhone photographs, the city often gets lost in darkness and the fireworks are enmeshed in large amounts of grain that is difficult to remove in postprocessing. In contrast, the DSLR photographs have rich color and deep data available. The cityscape came alive and using ISO 100 fostered a deep, black sky with minimal grain.
I love the iPhone camera for what it is. It takes good photographs about 90% of the time using computational photography that stretches well beyond the capabilities of a modern DSLR. For web, social media, and instant messaging, these photos are great. I learned how to trailblaze with an iPhone using some of the more manual and niche features of the camera. For truly creative work, however, nothing beats the DSLR. That creativity comes at a price requiring patience, skill, and a little bit of serendipitous luck.
Randy offered up his DSLR for Great Britain’s fireworks since he used it for Malaysia’s. Being a Canon guy my entire life, there is a touch of humorous sacrilege in going to the other platform. I wanted to seize the moment and use something different to gain perspective and grow skills. We brought out the tripod, trying to minimize the amount of blur due to camera shake.
Taking sharp photos requires a combination of focus, image stabilization, a tripod, a remote shutter release, and mirror-up mode. Just about all modern DSLRs have sophisticated focusing systems with in-lens image stabilization. Using a tripod is a natural next step as it fixes the location of the camera. A remote shutter release removes the tiny amount of movement from pressing the shutter button. Lastly, mirror up mode removes the even smaller vibration that comes from moving the mirror.
More modern DSLR cameras have Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and correlated apps to communicate with the camera. Canon users can download Cannon Camera Connect, while Nikon users use SnapBrige. The philosophy behind both apps is fairly simple. The camera connects to the phone using Bluetooth, then upgrades the connection to Wi-Fi automatically, and finally, the camera sends a video feed and allows the phone to control all of the creative settings on the camera. Sounds fairly simple, right?
The unfortunate reality is that both of these apps are complete and utter garbage. Both apps are plagued with disconnects, problematic retries, slow video, and unreliable phone and camera communication. At this stage of maturity, I highly recommend using an infrared shutter release.
The file way to reduce subtle amounts of blur is by using mirror up mode (Nikon) or mirror lockup (Canon). There is a small amount of movement in the camera from the mirror moving out of the way of the sensor to take the picture. Both modes move the mirror out of the way, allow the camera to stabilize, and then take the picture. For tonight, since we couldn’t get the remote shutter to work, I used mirror-up mode and pressed the shutter button manually. There is a touch of blur in some of the pictures – but it’s manageable in postprocessing.
The evening kicked off with a drone show which was more challenging to photograph in a fireworks mindset. The drones moved quickly, and the camera was configured to shoot slowly. As I was fiddling with the camera settings, I captured the two sponsors of the evening: the province of British Columbia and Honda, LOL. The drones remained stable, so everybody knew who put on the event and who paid for it 🤣. The fireworks settings did well here.
I was certain I wanted to shoot in ISO 100 to slow the shutter speed down allowing for light trails from the fireworks. The fun in the evening was balancing the aperture and shutter speed. Faster shutter speeds require a wider aperture opening. As the shutter speed slowed down, I needed less light hitting the sensor so the aperture tightened up.
Shutter speed was anywhere from two seconds to ten seconds were aperture balance between f/8 and f/25. Tonight’s settings were clearly driven by shutter speed and the aperture balanced to compensate. I focused on the farthest building I could see which gave the camera a reliable focus point each and every time. I could’ve gone to manual focus, but wanted the security of autofocus. Both Randy and I agreed four seconds was probably the right sweet spot for shutter speed but we both enjoyed creative affects the game from faster and slower shutter speeds.
All in all, it was a fun evening behind the lens. Tonight reminded me that photography is a continuous discipline and that I need to spend more time behind the lens of my own camera, learning how it intuits light for great photographs!
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