New Years Eve

Tonight is the night of fireworks and I intend to try and shoot a few using my Olympus 500E. With this in mind I had a little practice at getting settings that worked for fireworks - but in daylight. To do this I made up a sort of "studio" on the veranda using the black barbecue cover as a background and a brick wall as shelter. A sparkler was stuck into a piece of florist's "oasis" foam and Colin was my pyro-technician with the flame thrower!
For this shot I was using my 40-150mm lens and I set the shutter speed to 1/20 second and the aperture at F11
To begin with I went to the scene mode on the camera to see what the settings were in that. That is where I found out to use F11, however I knew that the speed was wrong. The speed in Scene mode was four seconds. I actually had a try with that setting and of course the captured picture was just completely blown out. Far to long! Even if it hadn't over exposed the picture would have been a white blur where the sparks are in this image.
I will try the settings I tried - F11 with a variety of shutter speeds ranging from 1/15 to 1/30 second - all of which gave good results. Of course the camera was locked on a tripod or there would have been blur.
Next blog hopefully will contain a shot of the fireworks!
AJ