Tramore Fireworks 2026

1st Sep 2026

Over the past few years now, the seaside town of Tramore, in County Waterford has been putting on what they call a “Monster Firework Display”, around the third week of August, almost a week before the primary and secondary schools reopen after the summer holidays.

I was in Waterford City one day in August when I saw signs advertising a firework display in Tramore. This year it was on Saturday, 22nd August, after sunset.

The information I came across online indicated Tramore Amusement Park as the location for the firework display. While it was still bright, I went for a walk around the green area next to the amusement park, to determine where the fireworks were being launched from, and from there, where I will go to view them. I looked for any area that is cordoned off, with security guards on point duty. As sunset got closer, more people started converging on the promenade, and the area surrounding the lake behind the amusement park, I concluded that the fireworks were going to be launched from an island on that lake.

My original intention was to go up to the elevated walkway on the promenade, next to the railings overlooking the beach, and view the fireworks from there. However, as the sun was setting, and the streets were lighting up, it became clear that the public lighting, and also the cars were likely to “get in the way” of the composition – there is a car park off the promenade, which would have ended up in between me and the fireworks. So I went across to the park, just over 100m in from the promenade, away from road lighting, and where the car park off the promenade will not be in picture. The map below indicates where I decided to set up my camera.

I had two lenses with me in the bag – a 28-300mm telephoto lens, and a 10-24mm wide angle lens. I decided to use the telephoto lens. With that lens, I thought I would be able to get images where fireworks will take up the majority of the picture, as well as the buildings in Tramore in the background.

The fireworks were advertised to start at around 9:40pm. According to the Photographer’s Ephemeris app that I have on my phone, sunset in Tramore that evening was at 8:40pm, and civil end (the sun being 6 degrees below the horizon) was at 9:15pm. In other words, it was sufficiently dark by the time the fireworks were due to start.

Having set up the camera, I took a few “test shots”, to make sure that the buildings in the background were in focus, and with that I decided I was as ready as I could be.

The firework display started shortly after 9:50, finishing at 10:05. Once the fireworks started they started going off fairly rapidly, there were only a matter of milliseconds after a firework burst in the air, before the next shell was launched. And there was quite a variance of heights that each firework went up – some fireworks only went up to just over 100m, so I had to zoom in a bit with the lens, so that they would take up more of the picture. Then there were others that went up about 400m off the ground, and even with zooming out with the telephoto, I was unable to fit these fireworks in the picture. Because fireworks were being launched at a rapid pace, I felt that putting on the wide angle lens was not an option, because in the time it takes to take off the telephoto lens, take the cover off the wide angle lens and put it onto the telephoto lens, and then put the wide angle lens onto the camera body, there is a real possibility I will miss a few fireworks. And of course, with the wide angle lens, because I was about 300-350m from the launch point, fireworks that were not going up so high into the air would have been “lost” in the picture.

What surprised me was the fact that the amusements continued to run, while the firework display was taking place.

When the last firework was launched, and burst in the air, the crowd cheered, and I thought to myself, some people are rather quick to conclude that the display was finished, when just 3 seconds had passed after a firework was launched, and a next one wasn’t coming. But I suppose with 3 seconds becoming 10 seconds, and it was becoming clear that the display was definitely finished.

I took about 140 images during the display. The following morning, I downloaded the images from the camera’s memory card onto the computer, and began a shortlisting process, to pick about 10-12 images to upload.

I used NX Studio, a photo viewer app by Nikon, for this process. I started by picking images that are reasonably presentable, and giving them a 1-star rating. When I went through all the images, I filtered the images by that rating, which means only the images that I had given a 1-star rating, will be shown. I ended up with about 50 images. With these images, I repeated the process, giving some of them a 2-star rating. And finally, of these images, I ended up picking 10 images to upload.

Looking back on how the evening went, there are probably a few things I could have done differently. Firstly, because some of the fireworks had gone up quite high, part of these ended up getting clipped out of the picture. I probably could have tilted the camera to portrait orientation, i.e. taller than wide. This probably would have meant taking in a little bit less of the town further in from the prom, but at least I probably would have been able to get most of the highest fireworks in the picture. I could also have used the 18-55mm kit lens that came with the camera, which would probably have zoomed out sufficiently for the higher fireworks, but I wasn’t confident about being able to focus this manually.

Flickr Link