Yale's 4th of July Firework Celebration

On the 4^th of July, Yale had its annual fireworks show at dusk so I drove west of town on highway 4 and parked my truck along the road.  With the FC-Coop behind the location of the fireworks, I set up my camera view to get the coop in the background.

 

From the bed of my truck, I had my D90 on the Slik tripod and used the Nikon 24-120 lense to capture the bursts of fireworks. I turned off VR and autofocus on the lense because I was on a tripod. I shot in RAW, base ISO of 200 and manual mode. With the aperture between 6.3 – 7.1, I ranged my exposures between 10-20 seconds using the bulb setting in manual mode. To keep the camera from shaking, the Hahnel remote was attached to the camera to keep the shutter open.

 

I first worked on the files in ViewNX by adjusting the exposure compensation. To help increase the exposure on the FC-Coop, I increased the exposure compensation from .3 – 1.0. Since the D90 did a good job on the white balance, I didn’t change that setting. However, I changed the picture control to a custom fireworks curve that I created last year. This curve helps brighten the fireworks and also the background.

 

The images were finished off in PSE11 with level adjustments and layer masks. Levels were shifted to the right on the slider which increased the contrast of the fireworks against the dark sky. Because this also affected the light on the Coop, I created a layer mask for the level adjustments and used a gradient to slowly blend them together.  The final step on the images was done with the sharpen brush by sharpening the firework bursts.

 

For the first time, I also experimented with HDR on a firework photograph. I created five different exposed images using ViewNX and created 16 bit Tiff files which were then blended together in EasyHDR. Overall, I was pleased with the results so will continue to experiment with this technique.



 

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#9. HDR image created in EasyHDR.

 
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