Ottawa·Photos

Giving it a glow: Your best shots of fireflies

We challenged our audience to send us better pics, and you delivered.

We challenged our audience to send us better pics, and you delivered

(Glen Hartle)

So shiny! So pretty! So hard to catch on camera!

Ottawa's wet spring weather has yielded an abundance of fireflies, illuminating parks and backyards across the Ottawa area with their flickering light shows.

They're beautiful to watch, but as we found out the hard way, very difficult to photgraph.

We asked you to do better, and here's what you sent us.


"The fireflies have been amazingly beautiful this year! They started several weeks ago and linger still. I live just west of Gatineau Park and the meadows surrounding my house have been … sparkling." — Glen Hartle

(Glen Hartle)

"Was out on our patio last night and saw this beautiful little firefly just as the sun was setting. A hard photo to time. Always makes me think of my childhood." — Emily Bertrand, North Gower

"A few years ago I went out to the Bruce Pit in the late evening specifically to experiment with taking photos of fireflies.… I found long exposures of 20 to 30 seconds at ISO1600 worked best because it caught interesting light trails as the fireflies flew around and also just enough light to faintly show the surroundings for context." — Chris Bruce

(Chris Bruce)
(Chris Bruce)

"My partner and I headed to the Mill of Kintail, a dark sky preserve. She brought her telescopes and I brought my camera equipment … One of my cameras was set up to take photos of the Milky Way  and it was not completely night yet, so I lowered my camera, set the exposure time to 5 seconds, and grabbed this photo of the firefly trails as they did their thing in the field." — Jay-Dee Purdie

(Jay-Dee Purdie)

"I had just sat down to enjoy my garden after watering it last night shortly after 9 p.m.., when I spotted him or her. We typically see groupings of them [in Orléans], but this one flew solo." — Krista Gebara


Keep sending us your photos via Twitter or Facebook, or email them to us at [email protected].