If your digital camera is set on automatic exposure, it will usually be fooled into grossly over-exposing the image because the scene will be dominated by the blackness of the night sky. Use the built-in monitor screen of your camera to judge whether or not the colours in your shots are bleached out from over-exposure. If they are, either try a manual setting or use the +/- EV compensation option and experiment with minus settings.

And remember, just because it’s dark, don’t boost the ISO setting of your camera to compensate. The brightness of the fireworks is normally more than adequately captured at a minimum ISO of 100. If you set a faster ISO speed you increase the chances of over-exposure and possibly introduce image noise grain.

The longer the shutter speed the longer and more dramatic the firework trails will be. But take care as anything longer than about 1/30th second will record any unsteadiness in the camera and you may need to use settings of as long as a second. If you are really serious, consider using a tripod.

For photographing fireworks in the sky or at any reasonable distance, switch it off! All flash will do is illuminate any smoke or dust in front of the camera and spoil the picture. But if you are photographing people close by with, for example, sparklers or torches, you can get some exciting effects by combining flash illumination and a slow shutter speed (above). The flash illuminates people and freezes the scene but the long (slow sync) shutter speed lets bright moving objects, like sparklers, leave long trails. Look for settings like slow-sync flash or use a slow manual shutter speed – say, between 1/4 and a whole second, with the flash on.

And finally, Take as many shots as you can. Fireworks don’t demand highest resolution camera settings so you can use a lower resolution setting to get more shots out of your memory card.