New Year’s celebrations were a great chance to do some firework photography, something I had surprisingly never done before. A conundrum you face, however, is that a large component of firework displays looking good is the movement in them, which is difficult to capture in still images. Photos like the one below are nice, but not very impressive.

A way around this is stacking multiple photographs using the ‘Lighten’ layer style in Photoshop. This way you can compose an image that displays the best of the fireworks all together, instead of in separate images. I particularly like the effect of layering photos that are in and out of focus together to get a ‘bokeh’ effect. It may not be quite as realistic as you like, but I like the dynamic of it.

I was also lucky that our fireworks display was on the lakefront, which allowed for some great reflections in the still water. It just adds that extra dimension to the scene. All of these photos were taken handheld, with the settings as mentioned above.