August 1st in Basel

As always the Swiss National day is celebrated with some spectacular fireworks on the Rhein in the center of Basel.
I had a good position in relation to the firing pontoon and was able to take a few nice images. My experience has taught me to get a long exposure of around 2 seconds. This is enough for a blast to burn its trail on the sensor. Longer exposures are fine too, but have a negative effect in that there is then much more time for other blasts coming in and overlaying eachother. I prefer to get individual blasts in. Less than 2 seconds won’t work, as the trail of the blast is then significantly reduced and looks like a half blast.

The rest of the exposure (manually set) is aperture and ISO, a few test runs will get you to the right exposure quickly. With my camera (5DII) I opted to keep ISO low (ISO200) and choose the appropriate aperture, in my case f/11.

Canon 5dII, 2sec @ f/11 @ ISO200

I rotated the image until it looked like a flower.