How to Photograph Fireflies Like a Pro This Summer

Do you remember the first time you saw a firefly light up against the dark? The sight is magical, and you can’t help but want to capture it. If you’ve tried without any preparation, it probably didn’t come out quite right. Here is how to photograph fireflies. Take your shots while you still can; the species is slowly disappearing.

When you’re ready to edit these firefly photos, Perfectly Clear is here to help. Our batch processing automatically adds up to 40 corrections to each photo using a combination of artificial intelligence and real science. Try it for free on Perfectly Clear Cloud, our online automatic editor.

4 Tips on How to Photograph Fireflies

1. Come Prepared

When you photograph light, you know that you’ll need a long exposure (we will get to that later). If you take a long exposure image, you will need your camera to be still or the photo will be blurry. So, always make sure you have a tripod or something that will hold your camera steady.

2. Your Camera Settings

To let enough light into your camera, you’ll need to change the settings to long exposure. Determine your aperture, shutter, and ISO settings experimentally. We recommend shooting 3-5 second exposures with ISO 200 as a starting point.

If you leave the shutter open too long, your background image will be just as bright as the fireflies and will look awful. The darker the background, the better.

3. Don’t Forget About Your Composition

Just because your main goal is to photograph fireflies doesn’t mean you can forget about the photo as a whole. A ton of fireflies in a clump won’t give much movement to the eye. If you’re stuck, just use the rule of thirds! Trees, rocks, and other usual outdoor objects make a great background for your firefly images.

4. Time to Edit!

Once you photographed fireflies, it’s time to edit your images. Consider automatically batch processing them with Perfectly Clear! All you need to do is load them into Perfectly Clear Cloud, our web app. Then, Perfectly Clear will analyze the contents of the image and apply corrections accordingly. Our technology can even use AI to determine that your photo was taken at night, so it knows not to apply too much exposure and keep the integrity of the image. Try it for free!