How to Take Photographs of Fireworks

With the 4th of July right around the corner, most Americans will be viewing a fireworks show somewhere.  Last year was the first year I had an SLR camera (Nikon D40x - which I love btw) so it was the first time I could really take pictures of the fireworks.  It was a great learning experience for me.  I read some articles before I went out to get some ideas, but it really just came down to trial and error.  Let me share some tips with you that might make your first time with a digital SLR a little easier.

1. First things first: you MUST have a tripod. Without one you will not be able to leave the shutter open long enough to capture the fireworks



2. Find an unobstructed spot. This means you probably want to get there a little earlier than normal so you don’t have any buildings, trees, lights, etc. between you and the sky where the fireworks will be shot off.



3. Get your Camera Settings right.  This is the part that is the toughest.  There’s really no standard settings that will work for all situations.  Put the camera on manual mode - Aperture or Shutter Speed Priority won’t work since you’ll start by looking at a black sky and it won’t compensate for the bright fireworks.  I set my aperture to f14 - this allowed me to leave the shutter open long enough to capture the motion of the fireworks without overexposing it.  I used the Bulb mode for my shutter speed.  Bulb mode basically means the shutter stays open as long as you’re holding down the button.  I found this gave me the ability to expose each firework differently without having to constantly change settings.  I tried all kinds of exposure lengths, but found that my best ones came out between 1.5 and 3 seconds.  I also used an ISO setting of 800, but this year I might try a lower setting to avoid some of the graininess in the pictures.  This means I’ll need to widen my aperture (lower f number) and/or lengthen my exposure time (although I’ll probably just change the aperture, I liked the results from the exposure time I used last year).



4. Use a trigger cable.  I didn’t have one, but if you do, use it.  This will help eliminate camera shake on the longer exposures.



5. Get your timing right. I generally found that pressing the trigger right after the bright bang of the fireworks exploding and holding for 1.5-3s got some of my best results.  You can also try starting the shot as the fireworks shoot up so you catch the tail (like the example in my photoblog below).

That’s about it.  I played around a little with the focal length but usually left it at my widest angle (18mm) since I figured I could always go back and crop out white space (or in this case black space) but I would be upset if I missed part of a blast.

One of my favorite shots is on my photoblog and I have some the others that turned out well on Flickr.  I’d love to see all of your fireworks pictures, so please leave comments with links to your images that you already have or take during the 4th of July festivities this year!  If you have other tips, I’d love to hear them, too.

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Update: (7/2/08): Saw a similar post on Lifehacker…check it out!

SyncMyCal Mobile - Update w/2-way Sync

Well I was able to get everything working with SyncMyCal and now I have a perfect sync setup IMHO.  Here’s what I’ve done:

1. Google Calendar (all three of them) are my master.  I’ve used that for over a year to enter every event/appointment/etc. so I wanted to start there to grab all events.
2. I grabbed the latest copy of SyncMyCal Mobile and installed it on my phone
3. I first had to Download Only my three calendars from Google (Personal, Work, Travel Schedule) to the phone.  I grabbed a few weeks worth of past events and a month or two of future events (depending on the calendar and my needs) to download.  I made sure to tag the event with the proper category (calendar) name so that when I viewed an event on my phone, it had a category with the same name as the Google calendar it came from.
4. After I was satisfied that all events were downloaded properly, I changed the operation type from Download Only to Sync (Google precedence) and re-ran the sync.  If you did it right, you should see no duplicate items.  Before I did this with the large date range, I tried each calendar with only 1 or 2 days in the future and past to ensure if I messed something up, I didn’t lose/duplicate too many events.
5. Now that my phone and Google were sync’d, I went back to Sync-Mate and setup a sync of my phone calendar to the Mac.  Before running the sync, I made sure that the only calendars I had in iCal were three blank calendars, again with the same names as the Google calendars and the categories in the phone.
6. I ran a Mobile device -> Mac sync with All Calendars first to load all events into iCal.
7. Once this was done, I did a Mac <-> Mobile Device sync.  With no duplicates, I was done!

I now use my phone as the “middle man” between Google Calendar and iCal, but since all syncing is done 2-way, I can add an event anywhere and it will sync across the other two platforms.  Since I travel most of the time and I’m not near my Mac, that sync wasn’t as important, but it’s nice when I am home.  The over-the-air sync of SyncMyCal Mobile is critical since I rarely can connect my phone to a computer (my work laptop doesn’t have Outlook and Lotus Notes doesn’t sync to the phone very well).

I hope this helps anyone trying to setup a Windows Mobile PDA to sync to their Mac and Google Calendar.  Let me know your thoughts/questions in the comments

SyncMyCal Mobile

I’ve been using SyncMyCal Mobile now for about 4 months (paid the $20 something for the Pro version) and it’s been satisfactory.  I’ve had some issues here and there but overall it does the trick — gets my Google Calendars downloaded into my AT&T (HTC) 8525 Windows Mobile 6 phone.  The biggest issue I’ve had with the software, though, is that it takes all 3 of my Google Calendars (Personal, Work, and Travel Schedule) and puts it into the single Outlook calendar on the phone with no way to distinguish where the events came from.  This made it impossible to sync both directions since if I did, every event would get uploaded into Google’s default calendar (Personal) regardless of what calendar it originated from.  I’ve dealt with this by only downloading from Google and living with the fact that I can’t create events on my phone.

Until today…I noticed that a new version of the software had come out that filled in the category field on the phone’s Outlook calendar based on the Google calendar it came from.  This sounded great so I immediately upgraded - or so I thought.  When I went to set this up, I found that the option for Category Sync wasn’t available.  I don’t think I did anything wrong (I completely uninstalled the old version and installed the new one), so I’m hoping this is just a glitch.  I’ve sent an e-mail to the SyncMyCal support and I hope they get back to me with an answer.  If this works, I will have a complete sync between Google, my phone, and my Mac (via SyncMate) for all of my calendars and contacts.

If you’ve had any luck upgrading, please let me know in the comments.  I’ll update with any news I receive…

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- Update 25 June 2008 (based on a comment from OggSync)

One of the major reasons I didn’t go with OggSync (which I did the free version for before I tried SyncMyCal Mobile) is that it was more expensive and it was only a 1 year subscription.  SyncMyCal is $25 to own the software while OggSync is $30 for a 1 year subscription.  If the price were to come down I would give it a shot, but until then I’ll stick with what I’ve already paid for.

Thanks for your comment, others may wish to go with OggSync since it seems to have more functionality already.

Flower Photography

I was reading through some of my photography blogs today and came across a collection of “41 Delicious Flower Photographs“.  These photos are absolutely beautiful and I highly recommend taking 5 minutes and looking at them.  I have posted some of my own on my photoblog (http://scott.menzer.org/photo) but this collection has really inspired me to be creative and take more flower pictures.  Hopefully over the next few weeks I will get a chance to take some more pictures while the flowers are still blooming.

Home Backup Policies

At my house, we have about 8 total computers running at any given time:

• a Media Center PC (media)
• a storage server (luna)
• 5 personal computers
• 1 or 2 work laptops

I needed a way to backup all of the data that is spread out over all of the computers, but I also couldn’t dedicate a single machine to only be for backups. The following system works for me, but it definitely could be improved, so keep that in mind when designing your own backup routines.

First, I want to get all of the personal computers’ data backed up. I use an iMac, so that’s taken care of with a 500GB external drive and Time Machine — definitely the easiest, most efficient backup I’ve ever used. The rest of the computers are PC’s, so I’ve installed SyncBack (freeware) on all of the machines. It is super easy to use and does an excellent job of scheduled backups.

To start, I setup backup space on both servers. I use dedicated hard drives in each server as the “backup” drive and share them across the network. Within each drive, I setup a folder for each machine that will backup to it. I have 2 computers backing up to one server and the rest to the other. If I had the space I’d have them all go to just one server, but with the way the files are distributed on each one, right now I can’t.

On each personal computer I setup 3 jobs in SyncBack:

1. Daily backup of all documents (I just backup the My Documents folder) to a “daily” folder; delete target files if not in origin (this basically makes the daily copy an exact replica of the source machine)
2. Weekly backup to a “weekly” folder; do NOT delete target files if not in origin. This means that if I backed up a file last week and deleted it on my computer this week, it will remain on my backup drive
3. Monthly backup; this is essentially the same as the weekly backup, but I DO delete target files that are not in the origin. This basically cleans up the “weekly” backup folder once a month of old files. You could choose to do this once every few months or once a year if you feel more comfortable and have the space to do so.

With this setup I always have two copies of each file in case I need to revert back to an older copy.

In addition to backing up the personal computers, I have setup backups of the servers where space allows me to. We bought a 500GB external drive that we are supposed to keep off-site (at work) except for one night a week when we bring it home to run backups. These backups are setup in SyncBack, also, and copy the entire Backup drives on both servers, as well as some of the data on the servers, such as movies, archived documents, tv shows, etc, that otherwise aren’t backed up.

With this system in place, I have recovered documents and restored crashed hard drives with minimal loss.

Like I said before, this system could definitely be improved, but right now space is a factor. I’m saving up to purchase a bunch of hard drives and RAID them in a NAS to provide redundancy and remove the requirement to backup everything to other servers or drives. In the meantime, if you have any suggestions, comments, or questions, please let me know in the comments!