Between June and July Docklands in Melbourne ran a winter festival known as the Firelight Festival. This was run around the Quay and consisted of a number of art installations from Fire Twirlers through to a giant status which was set alight and of course fireworks.

I could not resist attending (mainly for the fireworks) since it was a good chance to get the camera out and also have a play with my Pluto Wireless Trigger. To get started I set up the Tripod with my camera and set it on a short shutter speed (app0rox 2.5 seconds) and set the ISO and aperture accordingly.

Once this was done, I then set up the Pluto Trigger which was set to “Light” mode. Once I had set the threshold value I activated the Pluto trigger which began to fire the shutter once the light was above the threshold value (e.g. when the fireworks went off).

It worked remarkably well, other than the fact that I had perhaps set the value too low and then increases in light were detected (e.g. due to pulses of fire) it captured images. A good thing to note as well is for this to work, you should really use manual focus…

Equipment:

• Nikon D610
• Nikor 24 – 120mm Lens
• Manfrotto 190Go Tripod
• Pluto Wireless Trigger
• Lightroom CC

Images (click to enlarge):