If shooting in low light you are likely to be making exposures for one second or longer by using the bulb or manual setting on your camera. If using this technique you will encounter the problem of reciprocity failure. This means the usual combination of aperture, shutter speed and film speed fails to produce an evenly exposed negative. You can compensate for this by opening up your lens and increasing the exposure, overriding the meter reading. Combine this with bracketing your shots (see page 26), so for each central shot take two or three more with the lens opened up half a stop, and increase the shutter speed by two seconds and so on. There is an element of chance in this and the results may not be exactly what you saw, but you may find your image has gained something else. Digital SLRs tend to have very long manual settings, so that it can be set for 4, 6, 8, 15, 30 seconds or more. As this is a timed exposure, you can use the timer release, set to a short period of say one second after pressing the fire button. As a guide, begin with a basic exposure of f/8 and four seconds for 64 ISO film and bracket your exposures. Most digital cameras use 100 ISO and actually need slightly longer, so set the camera to f8 and the shutter speed to 15 seconds. Opening the lens just before a burst is launched will capture the fiery streak climbing skyward as well as the burst itself. As long as you can manually control your camera you should capture a great shot. Below: Exposure techniques for photographing fireworks vary. Expect exposure times to be long, varying from just under a second to more than 15 seconds. The trick is to have the shutter open at just the right time to catch the moment that the firework explodes. Set the shutter speed to `B' (bulb) and use a locking cable release as you will be making timed exposure. Left: This image was taken at f2.8 for ten seconds. The shot