[Barbara Fu]

I'm going to a firefly festival this weekend after failing to find the little creatures locally. I'm a bit obsessed, being from southern California where you don't find any at all, so this is basically a once in a lifetime shot for me.

How do I get photos of fireflies? I have an Optio VS20. I can use the Fireworks setting (and will use it for the actual fireworks that night, if I have any battery left) but night shots using presets eat battery life rather quickly. I'm pretty sure I can save juice if I use the manual settings, though I could be wrong on that.

What's your best advice for getting shots of fireflies? What are the best possible shots this camera will get, the closest, the clearest, the dreamiest, the most realistic?

FWIW the other cameras I'll be packing are my Galaxy 4 phone (not expecting much from that), my Narrative lifelogger (basically useless after dark) and a Sony action camera , AS50. It got me good night footage in Vladivostok but without a digital display I won't know whether it got anything until I get it home.

In case you're wondering about my taste in cameras, my first priority is portability, and I don't have much of a budget.

[BrianR]

Fireworks are far brighter than fireflies, typical fireworks settings may make the fireflies barely visible at all. Does your camera have a manual exposure mode? If so, I'd use that. Combining multiple exposures is usually the way to go, so a tripod and a remote (or built in interval mode if available) are a must. A spare battery would be a good idea - long exposures tend to kill batteries no matter what mode you're in.

My starting point for fireflies is f/2.8, iso3200. I then go with an exposure length that puts the background where I want, usually dark enough that it doesn't compete with the fireflies, but depending on the sky, it may need to be shorter. Then take as many photos as I have the patience for. An interval timer is handy, or a wired remote that lets you hold the shutter down. Stacking can be simple, the free StarStaX program offers a suitable blending mode.

Given the one-off nature of your outing, you might want to practice in advance if possible. A typical weak LED flashlight works ok to mimic a firefly. Find a nice field, give a friend enough beer that they're willing to run around the field swinging the LED around (but not so much that they fall over frequently) and practice photographing them and combining the photos later in the computer. Actual exposure settings may need a bit of fiddling when it comes to the real thing, but it can give you an idea.

I've posted these examples before.

f/3.5, iso3200, 30 second exposures, 10-17mm fisheye @ 10mm. 226 combined via StarStax Lighten mode. Gaps in star trails from clouds, light on grass from my house (I'm lucky to have fireflies in my 'yard'):



f/2.8, iso3200, 8 to 15 second exposures, DFA100mm macro, 83 exposures combined via StarStax Lighten mode. The sun was setting while the full moon was rising (the moon is lighting the field in the distance), so the varying exposure length kept the ambient balanced and let me use longer exposures as time went on so I had less files to combine.



f/3.5, iso3200, 30 second exposures, 10-17mm fisheye @ 10mm. 16 combined via StarStax Lighten mode. Good times as a firefly landed on the camera and walked all over the front element of the lens:

[Genobreaker]

You asked about this in one of my threads, but the 2 posts above pretty much covers it. You take a numerous semi-long to long exposures and stack them in photoshop or whatever software you use for post processing.
Definitely need a tripod or something to put your camera on since you need to do some long exposures.
Using a remote to minimize camera shake would be good. If you don't have one, an alternate would be using the timer function.

[Barbara Fu]

Alas,the shot was ruined not by failing your advice, but in small part from the limitations of the Optio and the most part by a bright moon and some not-so-bright fellow tourists. Apparently the concept of "dark sky" just never crossed their minds, and they scared most of the little creatures away. I saw a few, and those very close up, but no photos to speak of.

I did get some lovely fireworks shots later that night, plus one of the valley we were in by moonlight and I'll see whether I can get them pretty enough to post.

Thank you so much for your advice. A friend of mine tells me you can see fireflies in Capistrano, so the search for the tiny bioluminescent white whales continues...