Alfredo Boulton (1908-1995) was a dapper and sophisticated Caracas-born Venezuelan from a wealthy merchant family who, like many Latin American intellectuals of the period, dedicated himself to numerous activities: photography, art history, politics, cultural diplomacy and collecting, as well as multiple business enterprises. The range of these interests makes it hard to pin him down, but they also allow us to detect a broader sense of cultural purpose that cuts across all these disciplines.

As Mary Miller, the director of the Getty Research Institute, states in her introduction to this remarkable book, Alfredo Boulton: Looking at Venezuela 1929–1978: “In no small measure, Alfredo Boulton is the essence of 20th-century Venezuela, a mantle I suspect he would gladly accept.” Boulton has become such a paradigm for a certain vision of modern Venezuela that it is almost impossible to separate him from a national identity that he both reflected and, in many ways, constructed. Boulton’s Venezuela was a country in rapid expansion due to the discovery of massive oil deposits and a national government that was democratic and developmentalist. Perhaps more than any other country in Latin America, Venezuela embodied the values of the American Dream, yet its cultural identity, thanks in part to Boulton and his intellectual cohort—including the critic Mariano Picón Salas and the political theorist Arturo Uslar Pietri—tried quite explicitly to forge a national identity that was rooted in its specific history.

Mestizaje essence

For Boulton, the essence of Venezuela was in its mestizaje, a mixture of white, Indigenous and Black cultures. He was the first person to document art and artefacts from the Pre-Hispanic, Colonial, 19th-century and Modern periods of Venezuela, publishing scholarly accounts such as his three-volume Historia de la pintura en Venezuela (1964-1972) that emphasised continuity over rupture, as if all these artistic forms were roots feeding into the trunk of Venezuelan identity. In Boulton’s art-historical model, all traditions converge in Modernism, where they fuse into a harmonious whole.

Although Idurre Alonso, the book’s editor and Getty Research Institute’s curator of Latin American collections, makes the claim that “there has never been a project that looks at Boulton from a multidimensional point of view and emphasises his influence in the shaping of art”, this is not strictly true. In 2008 the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) published an almost 400-page volume, Alfredo Boulton and his Contemporaries: Critical Dialogues in Venezuelan Art 1912–1974, which was subsequently published in Spanish by Fundación Cisneros in collaboration with MoMA. The MoMA volume contains several of Boulton’s own writings, which are absent from the Getty book, but covers many of the same issues.

This new volume is published to mark the acquisition by the Getty of Boulton’s archive, including his photographs and papers, and accompanies an exhibition at the Getty Center (29 August-7 January 2024). The Getty brought together an international group of scholars to analyse the material and publish their findings. While the Covid-19 pandemic interrupted the full process, the result is nonetheless very impressive, with especially insightful essays by Alonso, Natalia Majluf, Jorge Francisco Rivas Pérez, Mónica Dominguez Torres and Alessandra Caputo Jaffe, each of which focuses on a different facet of Boulton’s life and work. The book is structured in three sections, each looking at a specific aspect of his career: his photography, his relationship to Modern art, and Boulton the art historian.

As a photographer—he was given his first camera in 1920 by his uncle, Henry Lord Boulton, and studied in Europe, influenced by contemporary Surrealism and Constructivism—Boulton was not quite in the league of other artists of the period, such as Alfred Stieglitz or August Sander, and his attempts to have an international career mostly floundered. But, as this book argues, his images nonetheless provide a fascinating window into contemporary Venezuela—and, especially, his relationship to it. His exotic and sexualised representation of mestizo men represent both his intellectual construct of a successfully fused multi-ethnic culture and his own thinly veiled attraction to these same bodies. Alonso rightly points to the problematic nature of this projection from a member of a mostly white elite, while also providing an interesting conceptual framework in which to understand the images and their context of “belleza criolla” (creole beauty).

Tireless promoter

In his relationship with Modern art, we see Boulton as a tireless promoter of Venezuelan art, using and building networks with institutions like MoMA (of which he was the International Council chairman) and the Organization of American States in Washington, DC, to promote Venezuelan artists. Unfortunately, the period in which he was most active, the 1960s and 1970s, were barren in terms of international interest in Latin American art. Beyond the scope of this book, it might have been interesting to see how some of those seeds bore fruit after 2000, with exhibitions like Armando Reverón at MoMA in 2007 or the current Gego exhibition (Gego: Measuring Infinity until 10 September) at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Venezuelan Modernism became very much part of the art-historical canon, a process Boulton did not get to experience directly, but which can be attributed, in part, to his efforts to make the country’s art legible abroad.

The section dedicated to Boulton’s art history is illuminating, as it focuses on his extraordinary archival efforts to trace the production of Venezuelan Colonial artists when few people considered them to be of any interest. In the dominant narrative of the time, Peru and Mexico were the centres of Colonial production, and Boulton made a compelling case for the inclusion of the Caribbean as an important centre for production and exchange of artistic languages between the Catholic and the native. Equally remarkable is his obsession with the figure of Simón Bolívar (1783-1830), the liberator of Venezuela from the Spanish Empire. Boulton organised an exhibition in which he traced the physiognomy of Bolívar through his representation in art, seeing how his features vacillated between white European, Black and mestizo, depending on the political winds of the times.

In 2010, Hugo Chávez, the then president of Venezuela, ordered the exhumation of Bolívar’s remains, to be performed live on national television in one of the most extravagant and disturbing spectacles of modern politics in this century. His purpose was to prove that Bolívar had been poisoned by the Spanish, and he described looking into Bolívar’s skull and communicating with him beyond the grave. Herein lies one of the tragedies of contemporary Venezuela: how the refined scholarship of someone like Boulton inadvertently created an image of the country embodied in its historical liberator, an image ready to be literally manipulated in the pursuit of a populist and catastrophic political programme.

Alfredo Boulton: Looking at Venezuela 1929–1978 paints a compelling portrait of a period in which art, art history and politics were part of a modernising project—a project that then fell apart in multiple ways. This publication has the merit of resisting the temptation to tell this tragic story of subsequent national collapse, focusing instead on trying to understand Boulton in his original context.

• Idurre Alonso (ed), Alfredo Boulton: Looking at Venezuela 1929–1978. Getty Publications, 288pp, 164 colour & 19 b/w illustrations, $60/£50 (hb), published 18 July

At first glance, Congolese photographer Kiripi Katembo’s images look like playful sci-fi montages: shaky Kinshasa streetscapes in which giant rocks seem to be falling out of the sky, like a lo-fi apocalypse. On closer inspection there are no special effects: the images are actually reflections in puddles, turned upside down, each capturing a fleeting moment of street life in a shimmering, suitably surreal fashion that’s arguably closer to the sensory experience of being there. It’s a testament to ingenuity: Katembo, who tragically died of malaria aged 36 in 2015, had little access to professional photography equipment, so he found his own way of using the camera. There was also an element of necessity. Most Congolese people do not want to have their picture taken, he once explained, so he had to seek less obtrusive ways of documenting his community.

Many Africans would have good reason to be suspicious of a camera pointed at them. The histories of photography and colonialism go hand in hand, especially in Africa. As Zimbabwean novelist Yvonne Vera once wrote: “In Africa … the camera arrives as part of the colonial paraphernalia, together with the gun and the bible.” Even as European powers were carving up the continent in the 19th century, explorers were returning the first photographic images of Africa, which inevitably reflected the mindset of the people creating them: “untamed” landscapes filtered through fantasies of “the dark continent”; quasi-scientific portraits of “subjects”, or even “specimens”.

A century on the gaze has reversed, and what a relief it is. Judging by A World in Common, the Tate Modern’s energetic, expansive new exhibition, Africa has taken photography and run with it. As well as a survey of modern Africa in all its variety and complexity, the show tracks how artists like Katembo have used photography in their own ways, subverting conventions, finding fresh modes of expression, even forging new, postcolonial identities for the continent. “It’s an attempt to reimagine the possibilities of photography,” says curator Osei Bonsu, “not just as a tool that documents reality but as something with the potential to liberate storytellers and give artists the agency to think the world anew.”

One of the easiest places to track African photography’s evolution is in the tradition of studio portraiture. At the turn of the 20th century, as in Europe, entrepreneurial white photographers set up studios for well-to-do locals. Santu Mofokeng’s archive of portraits of Black South Africans from the time shows them dressed in formal western attire – waistcoats, bonnets, bow ties – posing stiffly in mock-Victorian interiors. These Africans have commissioned their own photography, at least, but they could also be textbook illustrations of “internal colonisation”.

By the 1950s, the utopian, post-independence spirit of Pan-Africanism was sweeping the continent, and the medium was in the hands of Africans themselves. In West Africa, photographers like Malick Sidibé, Seydou Keita, and James Barnor were capturing this optimistic mood through both photojournalism and studio portraiture. Portraits from Barnor’s Ever Young studio in Accra, Ghana, capture young professionals such as nurses or teachers, or family occasions like weddings or births. The sitters appear relaxed and smiling, looking forward to bright futures.

Contemporary photographers have built on this tradition. Ethiopian Atong Atem and Nigerian Ruth Ginika Ossai’s studio portraits are bursting with colour and pattern and flamboyance. Ossai often selects the loudest possible fabrics, or backgrounds inspired by Igbo gospel videos and Nollywood films. “I wish my images to fill my subjects with power and agency, so they can be free and allow their true selves to shine through,” she says.

By the time we get to Hassan Hajjaj’s portraits of the “Kesh Angels” – female bikers in Marrakesh, Morocco – western notions of both portraiture and Arab women have been turned on their heads. Straddling street bikes and wearing colourful djellabas and veils, these women are cool, confident and confrontational. You’re not looking at them; they’re looking at you.

“It’s the idea that, if the camera has been a tool for misrepresenting certain bodies or subjects, how can it in equal measure now become a tool for liberating those subjects?” says Bonsu.

There is little straight photojournalism in the show; with many of these photographers, the work is less about capturing an outer reality than expressing an inner one. The term “Afrofuturism” has been overused to the point of exhaustion in recent years, and it fails to describe much of what’s going on here. As much as they imagine the future, many of these works incorporate the past – not just colonial legacies but the traditions they overwrote and all but erased. Modern fashions mix with tribal masks; historical images of shackled labourers are superimposed on to modern-day mining sites; African spiritualism mixes with Christianity and Islam. Past, present, future – it all becomes one. You could see it as an African state of mind.

“My reality is not the same as that which is often presented to us in western photographs,” said the late Rotimi Fani-Kayode, whose sensual portraits fuse European painting conventions with Yoruba iconography, and African ceremonial garb with modern fetish gear.

“The way that I see us Africans is that we exist in so many different points,” says Aïda Muluneh, one of the leading lights in African photography. “We are contemporary, we’re traditional, we’re unique in that way. And then we’re global at the same time. There are artists that live abroad; there are artists like myself that live on the continent. But within that, you have to look at what we are trying to say.”

Muluneh began as a photojournalist for the Washington Post; now she constructs striking tableaux that read like dream images: semi-abstract desert landscapes, white-painted women, swathes of saturated reds, blues and yellows. “These are colours that I feel very strongly towards, almost to the level of an obsession,” she says. “But they are more of a seduction; to seduce the audience into the image because there’s a lot of layers inside of it.”

Muluneh’s work often focuses on female perspectives and identities. Her Water Life series of 2018, for example, addresses access to water, and women’s work in fetching it. Each image is planned almost like a movie shoot, she explains, beginning with sketches, set building, costume design, makeup, often followed by a challenging location shoot, in this case at Ethiopia’s baking hot Dallol salt flats. “My biggest concern was that my lights were going to explode or my camera was going to melt,” she says. “We were out in this unforgiving sun and that desert wind, which is basically heat and fire in your face.”

Muluneh grew up in Europe and north America before returning to Ethiopia in 2007. As well as her own work, she has been busy building a local photography scene there – teaching, mentoring, setting up workshops and establishing a biennial festival, Addis Foto Fest, in 2010. Four years ago she set up a companion event in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, where she now lives. These are additions to a busy network of photography festivals that has emerged in the past 15 years, including Bamako’s African Photography Encounters, in Mali, and Lagos Photo, in Nigeria. These shows also introduce western photographers to Africa, just as artists such as Muluneh are exhibited globally.

The Tate has its own colonial baggage, of course, as an institution founded on the wealth of a sugar industry that was enabled by conquest and enslavement. But the images being served up for British consumption at Tate Modern now show us Africa on its own terms. It feels like less of a “them and us” situation. Many Britons themselves have African ancestry, just as many of these photographers have British connections. Ossai now lives in Yorkshire; Khadija Saye, whose portraits emulate 19th-century techniques but incorporate traditional spiritual practices, was a British Gambian artist who died in the Grenfell tower fire; Fani-Kayode lived and worked in Britain until his death in 1989. Bonsu describes his family as Ghanaian-Welsh. Inevitably themes of modern migration emerge, as in the work of Dawit Petros, an Eritrean emigrant who now lives in Canada. In his portraits, figures stand in the landscape with long mirrors obscuring their faces – literally reflecting where they’re coming from as they head somewhere new.

One of the guiding lights of the exhibition, Bonsu explains, was Cameroonian intellectual Achille Mbembe, who saw the west’s “dark continent” attitudes towards Africa as a reflection of its “desperate desire to assert its difference from the rest of the world … Africa still constitutes one of the metaphors through which the west represents the origin of its own norms, develops a self-image.” The colonial gaze was never really about the west’s ideas of Africa, in other words; it was about the west’s ideas of itself. But Mbembe’s notion of “a world in common” highlights the interconnectedness of the modern world, and the possibility of “thinking the world from Africa,” says Bonsu. “In doing so, one would gain a more expanded understanding of humanity.” Where the west once thought it was shaping African culture, Africa is now shaping ours.

• A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography is at Tate Modern, London, from 6 July to 14 January. Until midnight 5 July, Guardian readers can buy two tickets for the price of one using the code GN23AWIC. The Guardian is a media partner for this exhibition

One of the world’s most famous photographers will soon share his wealth of knowledge via a brand new course on BBC Maestro. The fashion and portrait photographer will be sharing over two decades worth of experience into digestible bitesize lessons that anyone with an interest in access the first two lessons free of charge, if you sign up before the official launch of the paid-for course. 

Rankin is widely renowned as one of the world’s greatest photographers. He’s shot everyone from he’s shot pop royalty in the form of David Bowie and Kylie to Minogue to actual royalty, Queen Elizabeth II (although he wasn’t allowed to photograph her hands). He’s worked on numerous of projects highlighting the impact of food waste to photographing West End stars to raise money for homeless charities. 

• These are the best cameras for portraits perfect for capturing in-focus faces with beautifully blurred backgrounds

For many aspiring portrait photographers, he is an inspiration and the new BBC Maestro series will cover everything from the equipment he uses, and different lighting techniques to interacting with models, promoting yourself, and networking. 

BBC Maestro first launched in November 2020 in partnership with BBC Studios to offer never before offered insights into the world’s greatest creative talents. Whether you want to learn how to produce music from Mark Ronson, write poetry from Carol Ann Duffy or find out how Billy Connolly become one of the funniest and most respected comedians, there truly is something for everyone no matter your creative flair. 

Prices start at £79 for a lifetime subscription to a single course which will enable you to watch videos as many times as you want at your leisure. If you’re a multi-faceted creative with interests across the arts you can also sign up for £10 a month subscription and access 100+ hours of video lessons, explore new courses as soon as they land and if you’re not enjoying the service there is a 30-day money back guarantee. All NHS and public health workers are entitled to a 25% discount, all you need to do is email support@bbcmaestro.com from your work email address. 

Courses are available in a wide number of countries around the world including the US, the UK and Australia

To sign up for your free two lessons head to the . 

Also check out the best lens for portrait photography and browse a range of super-sharp 85mm prime lenses

During the colonial period, the camera became something of an imperial device, as Western images defined narratives about the history, culture, and identity of the African continent. Now, in its first major exhibition of contemporary African photography, the Tate Modern in London is showcasing the work of a new generation African artists using the medium on their own terms.

“A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography” features 36 artists—working in photography, video, and installation—who represent different generations and a wide span of geography. Each offers their own unique perspectives on Africa and its relationship with the wider world, informed by history while looking to the future with hope.

The exhibition is curated by the museum’s international art curator, Osei Bonsu, together with assistant curators Jess Baxter and Genevieve Barton and former assistant curator Katy Wan.

“It’s not a traditional photography survey. I don’t really think that Africa can be summarized or distilled into one large exhibition,” Bonsu told Artnet News. “This was more of an attempt to tell very specific stories about Africa through the lens of artists who were either living and working on the continent, or were paying homage to many of the traditions and visual practices that, in my opinion, best reflected the way that we see photography in Africa.”

Khadija Saye, Ragal, “in this space we breathe” (2017). Photo courtesy of the artist.

The show features about 100 works presented in seven thematic sections by artists including Leonce Raphael Agbodjélou, Edson Chagas, Zohra Opoku, Kudzanai Chiurai, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, and Zina Saro-Wiwa.

Some photographs imagine alternate histories for the continent and its global diaspora, including the recreation of a royal precolonial past, with African kingdoms ruled by ancient dynasties.

Drawing on the more recent past, other photographers engage with traditions of studio photography, which became popular in African in the 1950s and ’60s as many nations achieved independence. These studios allowed African families to get their portraits taken, often for the first time—and the bonds of kinship captured in these images still resonate in their contemporary counterparts.

There are also photographs showing harsh truths about our present day reality and the growing climate emergency, documenting the rapid growth of Africa’s urban spaces—as well as hopeful imaginings of postcolonial utopias.

Together, the artists both reclaim African history and invite viewers to reconsider the continent’s place in the world, underscoring the importance of cultural memory and identity.

Ahead of this week’s opening, we spoke with Bonsu about the work of five of the artists in the show.

George Osodi’s “Nigerian Monarchs”

George Osodi, HRM Agbogidi Obi James Ikechukwu Anyasi ll, Obi of Idumuje Unor (in Palace) 2012, “Nigerian Monarchs.” Photo courtesy of the artist.

Osei Bonsu: “These images are about the role of traditional Nigerian monarchs in contemporary society. Before the amalgamation of Nigeria’s Northern and Southern Protectorates in 1914, these rulers would have been the kings and queens of various ethnic groups and communities. They no longer hold constitutional rights, but are the custodians of culture and kind of intermediaries for their community.

George is looking at the power and majesty and regalia of those traditional rulers, but also questioning perhaps the ways in which their role now has been sidelined or that some of these traditions have been somewhat forgotten.

They’re not costumes, they’re not models. The fact that they might seem almost like theatrical stage images is a testament to kind of historical grandeur and majesty of these traditional monarchs that still hold an important role today.”

Khadija Saye’s “Dwellings: in this space we breathe”

Khadija Saye, Andichurai, “in this space we breathe” (2017). Photo courtesy of the artist.

Osei Bonsu: “Khadija Saye was an artist who tragically died very young. But rather than focusing on the circumstances surrounding her death, we really wanted to show her contribution to the landscape of contemporary African photography.

An artist of Gambian/British heritage, Khadija’s work is testament to her mixed faith upbringing, with a Muslim father and a Christian mother. These images are an attempt to ground herself within that spiritual understanding of her own identity through the traditional Gambian rituals.

It’s a tribute to her ancestral background and faith through photography. She used a wet collodion tintype process, which was popularized in the 19th century and is rarely practiced any longer. It’s a labor intensive process that leaves much to fate and to chance.

When the artist spoke about the experience of working this way, she related it to kind of spiritual transcendence in which the process becomes somewhat of a kind of a means of surrendering to the chemical outcome. The process captures these very irregular and almost kind of ghostly presences of herself.”

Zina Saro-Wiwa’s “Invisible Man: The Weight of Absence”

Zina Saro-Wiwa, from “The Invisible Man” (2015). Photo courtesy of the artist.

Osei Bonsu: “Zina Saro-Wiwa is an artist of Nigerian heritage who is based in the U.S., but grew up in the U.K. She worked as a journalist and is widely recognized for her work as a filmmaker and as an artist.

In “Invisible Man,” you see the artist reckoning with the her experience of loss in her own family, notably the death of her father, a climate activist and Nobel Prize nominee. She is posing in these photographs in a mask, because when one puts on a mask, you enter a realm between the living and the ancestral world.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, masks became very desirable objects, both as objects of ethnic culture and for the avant garde. But these masks were part of the way that African people related to their environment, the cosmos, to their ecosystems, and are still part of a living culture. The mask still has a very particular relationship to environment and to the way people relate to the ecosystem, which is under threat due to ongoing extractive practices particularly in relation to oil.

There’s a beautiful quote on the artist’s website saying that she was told that these masks were too heavy for women to carry. So, she had her own mask commissioned as a protest against this very gendered practice of excluding women from the politics of masquerade.

“Invisible Man” is one of the more poetic attempts for an artist to think about African history and cultural heritage, but really through their own lived experience.”

Sabelo Mlengani’s “Country Girls”

Couple Bheki and Sipho, 2009. From the series “Country Girls.” Photo courtesy of Tate and the artist.” width=”677″ height=”1024″ srcset=”https://www.mecreates.com/story/news/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Screen-Shot-2023-07-03-at-6.45.42-PM-677×1024.png 677w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/07/Screen-Shot-2023-07-03-at-6.45.42-PM-198×300.png 198w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/07/Screen-Shot-2023-07-03-at-6.45.42-PM-33×50.png 33w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/07/Screen-Shot-2023-07-03-at-6.45.42-PM.png 1000w” sizes=”(max-width: 677px) 100vw, 677px”>

Sabelo Mlangeni Couple Bheki and Sipho, 2009. From the series “Country Girls.” Photo courtesy of Tate and the artist.

Osei Bonsu: “Sabelo Mlengani is a South African photographer who grew up in the province which is where the “Country Girls” series was shot. It’s a very personal reflection of LGBTQ life within the South African countryside.

We often associate these queer lives with kind of cosmopolitan environments, but there are also queer people who fashion their own identities within the countryside. The artist makes his subjects visible through these very intimate family portraits that both celebrate the kind of communities that are portrayed, but also think about their precarity and the vulnerability.

What he does by looking at this community is to upend or challenge many of the assumptions that people have that this is a recent trend or it’s kind of Western import. Queer culture, queer subjectivity is actually part of everyday life and very much in the spirit of the country.

We’ve included the ‘Country Girls’ series in an area of the exhibition titled ‘The Family Portrait,’ because we often see more conventional or normative depictions of family. This was an attempt to think about a more expanded idea of family that had more to do with one’s chosen family rather than one’s biological family.”

Dawit L. Petros’s “The Stranger’s Notebook”

Dawit L. Petros, Untitled Epilogue II Catania Italy (2016), “The Stranger’s Notebook.” Photo courtesy of the artist.

Osei Bonsu: “Dawit L. Petro is an artist, now based in Chicago, whose family migrated from East Africa to Canada. In this work, he’s thinking about the longer histories of migration and border crossing, and his own experience as an outsider in many contexts.

This series was created over a year-long period of traveling Africa to Europe along the Mediterranean coast, retracing the journeys of migrants seeking better lives—the kind of sites of journeys of border crossings that we know often end in tragedy.

In the photographs, taken in Sicily and Mauritania—sites of arrival and departure for migrants—the subjects are holding mirrors that [reflect] back to the viewer, revealing coastline, power lines, all of these kinds of liminal spaces beyond the reach of the camera. ‘Stranger’s Notebook’ is a meditation on the ways in which we often aren’t able to humanize those who are the statistics on the global news reel, whether it be the refugee crisis or successive forms of of economic migration around the world.

It’s an attempt to grapple with the complexities of what it means to represent a subject that is unrepresented. And it makes you think not only about the contemporary implications of migration, but the much longer interconnected history and relationship between Africa and Europe.”

“A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography” is on view at the Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TG, July 6, 2023—January 14, 2024.

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It is that time of year again when families head out for Fourth of July festivities, to reach a climactic end with a panoramic view of fireworks exploding in the night sky. While many will want to just sit back and take in the magnificent view, others will want to capture them on a camera so they can look back on a fantastical evening.

July 4th typically means a day spent enjoying time with the family, cooking on the grill, and then everyone heading out just before dusk to catch the local fireworks show. For the many that will attempt to capture the light show in the sky with a digital camera, here are a few tips to help grab some gorgeous memories. Even if someone uses their smartphone, many of these tips will apply to them as well.

Perhaps the most important thing to remember to take with you to the fireworks show is a sturdy tripod. Being able to steady your camera will ensure a crisp and clear image, while shooting handheld may cause the image to become blurred. If you do plan to use a tripod, having a cable release, or a remote shutter release, will be of great assistance, as just touching the shutter button on the camera itself can cause your camera to move. Turning off vibration reduction in the camera settings is a good idea as well, as it usually does not play well with a tripod.

Another great piece of equipment to have in your camera bag is a spare battery. If the fireworks last for an extended period of time, chances are you will be snapping a ton of images. Having a spare battery could mean being able to capture the grand finale or missing it altogether. The same goes for having a spare memory card. If someone is shooting in high-resolution and RAW at the same time, which is recommended, those files can take up a lot of space very quickly.

Prime lenses are great for capturing sharp and detailed imagery. However, having a wide-angle lens will be the best bet for being able to capture all of the fireworks and the scenery in the foreground. Those planning on using a zoom lens will want to use the widest angle available, as to capture more of the night sky, and then zoom in as desired from there.

Try composing images using different angles and with interesting backgrounds. Many will simply point their camera toward the sky and only capture the fireworks themselves, so think outside the box and be creative. Step back from the crowd and try and incorporate it into the image with the fireworks being the background. If there are buildings or a city skyline in the foreground, include those in some of the photos as well.

When it comes to camera settings, a good place to start is having the camera in manual mode with an ISO of 100 or whatever the lowest available is, with longer shutter speeds in the range of 1.5 to 4 seconds in order to capture more of the firework trails. F-stop will typically fall somewhere between f/8 to f/16, depending on location. So, start at f/8 and adjust from there as needed. Photographers will want to underexpose their images because fireworks are extremely bright. Keep in mind that all of these settings may need to be adjusted once the show starts, so be ready to adjust accordingly.

At the end of the day, having fun is the name of the game. Don’t get overly stressed trying to capture the perfect image. Also, don’t be afraid to experiment with framing images in a unique manner, or even blurring the fireworks for a dramatic effect. All of us at HotHardware wish everyone a very happy Fourth of July.