I've been very happy with the EF-M 15-45mm "kit" lens for fireworks. Even if you can't get real close, I think this is one of those situations where it makes sense to take advantage of the high resolution of the M50 and crop to what you want. Here is one where I cropped a vertical segment out of a landscape shot.
Thank you much for that advise.
I picked up the Canon EF-M 22mm f/2 STM Lens this week for the M50 Mark i, it was normally anywhere from $150.00-$200.00 but B&H had it as a send your email and they would send you a discounted price and I got it for $99.00 and I have been wanting to try a prime lens so I grabbed it. I can tell already that I wish I had been able to get the 32mm that I wanted but it is a nice little lens, the 32mm just gave a little more punch which is what I wanted, but I plan to get an R5 by the end of the year, I would have gotten on in April but there have been a lot of health problems here so I held off. Nothing special, just a shot outside the hospital where my GF is rehabbing her broken hip. I wonder if the new lens would work well for fireworks?
I am extremely sorry to learn about your partner's health issues. It must be terribly distressing for you and you have my sympathies. I hope the treatments for her injuries progress well and you do get the chance to photograph the fireworks on July 4th as it will be a stress relief for you, which I suspect you will welcome and need. When my wife was dying of cancer, photography was my escape: taking a photography brought me away from the stresses and distresses to be in the moment, and made me concentrate on something else.
As some of my colleagues have mentioned, much will depend on how far away you are from the action and the spread of the fireworks, which can vary quite considerably, depending on the budgets, restrictions and skills of the show hosts!
It might be a good idea to look for photos of the fireworks at that event in years past to figure from what points the images were taken from and the scale of the show compared to landmarks below.
Generally, I try to get a bit of the ground and area around the likely spread - it is better to crop in a bit than cut out the display, and the challenge is that those lights can be very unpredictable in intensity and spread. I shot on a tripod, in B mode with a remote shutter release and just opened and closed the shutter to try to capture significant bursts, or collections of them.
As far as lenses go, considering the lighting conditions and the spread, you could do far worse than looking at the EF-M 11-22mm, it's an excellent lens in its own right and if you bought one you may well like it for other purposes.
To give you an idea, I will include a couple of shots that were taken with a Full Frame camera using a 24-105L lens, so I shall translate the focal lengths into what you would need to get those Fields of View on your M-50.
Again, however, much depends on where you are related to the fireworks, and how wide they spread. It's not an exact science unless you know all the details of the setup for the display.
Again, I hope things for your partner stabilize and even improve, both for her sake and yours.
As we say in NZ: Kia Kaha, which is a Māori mantra meaning hang in there, or endure...
