(ABOVE: Fireworks, with "tail," shot from across the Mississippi River with New Orleans in the background.) 

At some point every photographer winds up shooting fireworks. You, well, almost have to. This because earning your fireworks merit badge nudges you a step closer toward becoming the equivalent of an Eagle Scout of the lens.

Unlike most of my fellow shooters, however, I never sought out fireworks. It’s not that I’m lazy by nature so much as I’m indolent by strategic design.

So, months ago when my boss at my former employer, The Times-Picayune, gave me an assignment to shoot fireworks for the former daily newspaper’s Sunday Real Estate page, I confess that I gulped hard and feigned a happy-camper smile. Although I had never before shot fireworks, there were two things of which I was certain: (1) it’s not as easy as it looks, and (2) firework shows typically are short – 15 minutes tops – so you have a narrow window of opportunity to get it right.

Yeah, the prospect of shooting fireworks is scary when your job can depend on the outcome.

I went to school on the best of the best in the industry – namely, Joe McNally, the internationally acclaimed photographer “whose career has spanned 30 years and included assignments in over 50 countries,” according to his website. (Read his post on shooting fireworks here: http://www.joemcnally.com/blog/2011/06/13/shooting-fireworks).

Workaday shooters like myself can only dream of the kind of career Joe McNally has enjoyed, which has included shooting covers for Time, Newsweek, Fortune, National Geographic, Life and Sports Illustrated. Plus, he's the Yoda of off-camera lighting as best exemplified in this image he shot of a Navy Pegusas unmanned aerial vehicle http://www.flickr.com/photos/22850932@N06/4688539026. (Yes, the lighting beneath the vehicle is the result of off-camera strobes he placed strategically around the aircraft. It’s beyond brilliant.)

But what of fireworks? Because of differing lighting conditions and shooting environments unique to each fireworks display, it’s not possible to simply copy cookie-cutter style another shooter’s recipe for success – too bad. On the other hand, shooting by the bootstraps and relying upon your own ingenuity while still delivering the goods is what separates the pros from the hopefuls.

(ABOVE: Fireworks, without "tail," shot against nighttime New Orleans.)

Here’s the skinny on my gear and how I tooled my settings:

-- Camera body: Nikon D200.

-- Lens: Tokina 12-24mm super wide-angle zoom.

-- Manual focus: Essential – no lens can autofocus fast enough to capture fireworks at night. Plus, it’s precisely because my middle-aged eyes are so bad that I set the aperture to a distance-forgiving f/8-11.

-- Tripod: ’Natch -- don’t leave home without it.

-- Manual white balance: 2500k (to help blue-shift the nasty yellows and greens emanating from nearby fluorescent bulbs and mercury-vapor streetlights, respectively).

-- ISO: 100-400 (I leaned more toward a light-generous 400 to capture the background cityscape of nighttime New Orleans).

-- Shutter speed:  set to *bulb* (manually using three- to five-second exposures).

-- Other essential equipment: infra-red frequency remote-shutter release.

During my first-ever fireworks shoot I had a difficult time deciding whether I preferred images with or without a streaming “tail.” So, I shot it both ways for my editor. (If you prefer your fireworks without a tail, wait a full second after the initial “boom” before opening your shutter; if you prefer yours with a tail, click the shutter the moment you hear the boom.)

I’m not trumpeting these images as the best known to humankind – these are merely a rather modest exposé of how a reasonably experienced shooter tackled his first-ever fireworks assignment with a little prior research coupled with a bit of in-the-field know-how.

But after all is said and done and we’ve washed away the academic “eggheadism” (coined term, I think; trademark pending anyway), fireworks snapshots are just plain fun to look at.

And isn’t this the real reason we bother to pick up a camera in the first place?