Panorama Days Fireworks over the Lake Lighthouse

The first weekend of August this year celebrated Panorama Days and on Friday night, fireworks were shot off the south shore of Lake Panorama above the main basin. I had inside knowledge of this location and the ability to get out on the jetty right next to the lighthouse to have that landmark in the image. While waiting for the first burst of fireworks, I also took photographs of the Port and Lakeside Inn.

Since I was shooting in the dark, I placed the D90 on the Slik tripod and switched between the Nikkor 24-120mm and 12-24mm lense depending on how close I got to the lighthouse. Manual focus and VR turned off helped me get sharp images during the long exposures. For the Port images, I had an ISO of 800 while the fireworks were shot at ISO 200. With the camera set in manual mode, I had an aperture of f7.1 or f9 and had an exposure ranging from 15 to 30 seconds. The fireworks exploded in different locations of the sky which helped me shoot longer and combine multiple bursts.

The technique called light painting was also used on the lighthouse to increase the exposure on the building by using a small LED flashlight. Having my camera set up with the Hahnel Wireless Remote allowed me to move around and “paint” the lighthouse with light from the flashlight. I would later use these images in post processing to combine them with the firework images.

In ViewNX the images of the Port were processed by changing the white balance to shade and the picture control to Nature-Landscape. I also adjusted the highlight/shadow slider if needed. On the firework images I left the white balance alone but changed the picture control to Firework. The highlight/shadow sliders were also adjusted. To create the HDR images, I changed the exposure compensations from -1 to +1 on five images so I could combine them in EasyHDR.

Once in PSE 11, my first step was using the clone brush to get rid of unwanted objects throughout the scene of the image. Shooting long exposures in darkness, I’ve found that sometimes you get weird lights in the skies so using the clone brush helps clean those up. Because I had images of the lighthouse being light painted that exposed it brighter, I merged them into the images of the fireworks. Layer masks and adjusting the opacity of that layer allowed me to merge the two together in a natural manner. The last step involved using the sharpening tool just on the firework burst and straighten/cropping the image.

As the summer winds down, I’ll be switching gears to taking photographs of the hunting seasons and harvest. I can’t wait to see the brightly colored fall

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