Writing with Sparklers // How To

Every year you see the amazing pictures people have made with sparklers, spelling out their names, drawing love hearts or just a crazy mess of lines in the darkness. Ever wondered how it's done? Stick around and I'll try to explain it to you.

First off here are some of the examples Bekah and I achieved this year using my Pentax K-r camera.

Cool right? Well we love them.

The most important setting you need to work with in order to create these images is Shutter Speed. This controls how long the camera's shutter is open and letting in light. So the longer the shutter speed is the longer it takes a photo and the more movements of your sparkler are captured in your picture.

For most of the images above the shutter speed is between 4 and 13 seconds. The longer the word we were trying to capture the longer the shutter speed was.

Shutter speed is something you can probably change on your smart phone too so even if you don't have a DSLR camera you can give this a go.

The other setting I altered for these photos was the ISO setting. ISO is how sensitive to light your camera is, the higher the ISO is the more sensitive to light your camera will be. For these photos I turned the ISO down to 400, which is as low as my camera can go. This meant that my camera didn't pick up light from other sources as much, such as street lights in the distance and it meant the background of the photo was more black and the focus was on the sparklers more than anything else.

ISO is not something you can necessarily change on camera phones, but if you're photos come out too light in the background you can always edit them later.

It's a combination of these two settings that really makes these photos work, without changing the ISO you end up with a picture which is over exposed and looks rubbish. Likewise without changing the shutter speed you would end up with only the slightest movement of the sparkler which wouldn't give you the photo you want.

FINAL TIP: If you don't like sparklers/don't have any/are too young for sparklers there is an alternative. Bekah and I tried out using our phone torches as a way of creating these photos and it worked really well. I'll put some examples down below. We used exactly the same set up as with sparklers but with our phone torches instead, handy!

Have you created any photos like these? We would love to see them!

Kate // SK