How to photos of fireworks?

[yan]

I tried unsuccessfully to take photos of the Sydney New Year Eve fireworks. I googled and read on a couple of sites to use a tripod, set the shutter to bulb, ISO to something low like 200 and have an reasonably small aperture. Anyway, the results looked terrible, and I am wondering what are some combination of settings to try? When I used bulb, and had a long exposure, the picture looked fuzzy and there was alot of smoke from the fireworks. Should I have used a faster ISO? But that would make it 'noisy'. Sigh...any advice would be gratefully received. I need to brush up for next year!

[CherylB]

I'm not sure about the bulb setting for fireworks Yan - it sounds like a recipe for over exposure to me! Fireworks are actually very bright for a short time, so you shouldn't actually need very long exposures. I took some shots last night of the Hobart fireworks and all I did was set my camera to a shutter speed of 1 second and let the camera take care of the aperture (so I was using the Tv option). I set the ISO to 400. I didn't do too badly, but in hindsight probably could have made a few adjustments there - but fireworks is one of those situations where you don't want to be fiddling around with the settings while the show is on or you'll miss all the action! I consequently had to adjust the photos a bit in Photoshop to recover some of the detail (increased fill light), so next time I would probably decrease the ISO and increase the shutter speed a bit.