Once you discover that a good camera properly set can freeze a moment of time that you’ve always experienced as a continuously rapid experience, you are for a short while obsessed with it. You are Muybridge and his horses, every frame a revelation. So that is what is happening! There, look: the hooves, off the ground completely! Who knew?
When it came time for me to take a big group of my favorite images and put them in a cloud drive so I could find them always, I looked through my Lightroom catalog at all the firework pictures I’d kept. I just couldn’t feel that any of them belonged with the images that I was proud of or wanted to have easily available. I didn’t delete most of them, but I just left them there in the big catalog, mostly unwanted.
Why?
It feels technical. It feels dead. The only good fireworks pictures ever are hugely wide-angle shots that include the landscape. Where in fact the landscape—the scene illuminated by fireworks—is the point. Just capturing fireworks frozen turns out to be visually inert. It delivers nothing except the momentary sensation of “ah, so that is it.” It’s not how we live in the world, but neither does it show anything as electrifyingly unexpected as a horse flying.
When I was a child on Fire Island one and one time only I experienced fireworks directly overhead of sufficient power to light up the entire sky like the Northern Lights. I will never forget it. Nor a performance when I was a teen of the 1812 Overture with fireworks timed with cannon-firings in the live outdoor (obviously) performance.
There are some things that the realism of photography, with all its capacities to signal more than was intended in the framing, cannot do.
Hmmm..... Well, I've just taken a bunch of fireworks photos so this is on my mind. The thing is, my camera is not particularly good in low light. I can't get nice crisp shots of the incendiaries flying about. Sometimes the camera moves too much (I'm shooting handheld); I can toss those out. And sometimes, much/most of the time, the focus is soft. That's OK. Because the imagine is always dim and sketchy. So to get a decent amount of light I have to ramp up the exposure, which forces a cascade of other adjustments – as I'm sure you can appreciate (I work in Lightroom too, though sometimes move to Photoshop for more work). But if things work well, I end up with nicely shaded billows of cloudy-color punctuated by dots and streaks of light. Not at all what my eye saw, but then NO photo EVER IS what the eye saw.
Moreover, I live in Hoboken, NJ, on the west bank of the Hudson River across from Lower Manhattan and just north of Jersey City. Both NYC and Jersey City had fireworks. So OTOH I've got fireworks looming up behind the Manhattan skyline (they're launched from barges in the East River) and OTOH I've got them peeking from behind and over Stevens Point (highest point in Hoboken) to the south.
But it does take a bit of work to pull images out of those shots.
And then there's shaky-cam, long manual exposures in low light in which you zoom and pan the lens so you can 'paint' with the light of the city.