Video of fireworks taken with digital SLR, etc.

[trish_mc]

I don't know where the video section of this forum is, so I'll start here. I am looking for ANY digital camera, SLR, point&shoot that takes decent videos of fireworks. I've gone through several cameras and filmed fireworks displays and the fireworks turn out totally lousy--they don't look like videos as seen through the human eye. I've used a Sony point&shoot 3.2 megapixel -forget about it; I've borrowed other point & shoot cameras (Samsung) forget about it and bought a 9.0 Fuji SLR and took videos of fireworks displays -- forget it. I'm looking for any type of camera that can take the most realistic videos of fireworks displays. I'm Trish at trish_mc@yahoo.com

[Skyman]

Trish, when it comes to capturing good video of fireworks it is not as easy as you would think. The first thing to look for would a camera with a "fast lens" this means that the aperture of the lens (measured by the symbol f and a number eg f5.6) lets in more light that a slower lens. Basically the smaller this number the better. To that end I would be going for at least f2.8 (we should note here that this number changes with many lenses as you zoom in, so check that out as well) then you want a camera that has the ability to set a slow shutter speed again this will allow more light to hit each frame of your video. and thirdly a camera that will allow you to manually adjust the "gain" of the camera. this artificially boosts the sensitivity of the camera enabling it to work in low light situations. however you need to be careful here of what we call "gain grain" that is loss of quality due to turning the gain up to high. this is normally noticed as a greying or fuzziness of the darker areas of the video and a generally unsharp look. most of these features will only be found in video cameras that take a videotape. It sounds like you have been looking at still cameras that do video and these will usually give a poor result in terms of fireworks.