Yale's 4th of July Fireworks

On the 4^th of July, I found myself along highway 4 looking towards Yale capturing their firework show. I used the bed of my truck for my shooting platform and set up my equipment.

The D90 was still giving me trouble even without using my Hahnel remote. The connection port for the remote was very loose which I thought was causing the lcd display not to work, but I was wrong. Once again, I had to set up my camera settings off of past experience. I had my camera on the Slik tripod and 24-120mm lense set to manual focus and VR off. I used either a 50mm or 75mm focal length to capture the scene. Manual exposure was set up bulb as the shutter speed and f9 as the aperture. Exposures ranged from 4 – 25 seconds in ISO 200. I also was in RAW and left the exposure compensation at 0.

Using View NX I processed the RAW files and was happy with a number of settings right out of the camera so I left the white balance alone and didn’t change the picture control on the majority of the images. On a few of them, I did change it to Landscape to help improve the color of the firework burst. Mostly I adjusted the exposure compensation and highlight/shadow sliders if need be. I did make a couple HDR images so I followed the same steps as I used in the previous post.

I then worked on the TIFF files from ViewNX using PSE 11 by using a levels layer, clone brush and the sharpen tool. Using the levels layer plus their layer masks allowed me to increase the brightness of certain areas of the image while keeping the other areas dark. The clone brush allowed me to get rid of unwanted objects and the sharpen tool was used mainly on the firework burst to sharpen that area. The final step was to straighten the image and crop if needed.

The last few years, I’ve been shooting the firework scene from highway 4 so next year I hope to get a different perspective by going to a different vintage point.

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