Snap Dynamite Fireworks Photos

An expert’s cell phone camera tips.

- Juliana Labianca

SHOOTING LIGHT OF ANY KIND can be tricky, and professional photographers would tell you to use a proper camera to best capture fireworks. But that doesn’t mean you can’t take perfectly good pictures on your smartphone—if you use a few tricks.

Don’t touch the zoom. All it does is crop the photo before you shoot. If you crop it afterward, says Amadou Diallo, a digital photography instructor at New York’s International Center for Photography, “you’ll get the same result and can experiment with multiple crops away from the pressure to get the shot.”