New years eve 2015, it was windy and cold by the waters near Houston.  Family fireworks about to start and since I was traveling lightly, I didn’t have my tripod.  Let’s see if I can shoot this handheld.  Here are the result.

Basically cranking up the ISO to 12800, shooting with my Sigma 35mm f1.4 lens at f1.8 and 1/30s.  The focus is set to manual and to infinity.  Quite acceptable result had been achieve with this handheld setup.  Even though noise is visible in the images but at ISO 12800, the noise level is quite good.  Same level of noise is probably what we used to shoot five years ago at ISO 3200.  I am not about to print 20×30 with these images but these are amazing consider the portability of the setup.  I was able to run around without much issue and getting the fireworks at different angles.

Here are a couple of shots of my mom holding a sparkler, also shot with the Canon 5D3 at ISO12800.  The focus is with spot focus on the face and I was impressed how it was able to nail the focus consider how dark the scene was.