Yankee Doodle Pops Fireworks - Des Moines, IA

Over the 4^th of July weekend, I found myself at a new venue to take firework photographs while spending time with my family. In downtown Des Moines at the capital, the Des Moines Symphony put on a great night of music followed by a splendid show of fireworks. Being a new venue, I didn’t know for sure were the fireworks would explode in the sky and how to deal with the number of people there. My D90 also threw me a curveball when the back monitor and a number of bottoms stopped working! I was unable to see how my long exposed shots were turning out because of this malfunction.

Because of the trouble with the camera, I went off past experience. I had the 24-120mm lense on the D90 and my Slik tripod placed on top of a flower bed to try to get above some of the spectators. I switched off VR and manual focused to infinity. I notched my control dial to manual and set the shutter speed at bulb and aperture at f11 and later in the show f16. I used my Hahnel remote to trigger the shutter and kept it held down while the fireworks went off. The exposures lasted between 3 and 15 seconds. I of course used the D90’s base ISO of 200 and shot in RAW.

The next day, I uploaded the files onto my laptop and was glad to see that my past experience had paid off and the images turned out pretty well for what I was dealt with. In View NX, I left the white balance unchanged and changed the picture control to Landscape. I also used the highlight slider if needed as well.  I took three of the images a step further into Easy HDR and made 5 different exposed images in ViewNX by changing the exposure compensation to create HDR images.

I ended the post processing in PSE 11 by first cloning out unwanted objects using the clone tool. The next step of using a levels layer and layer masks allowed me to fine tune the look of the firework explosions to help reduce blown high lights. Next came straighten the image using the rotate tool to get the skyscrapers looking right followed by cropping the image. The final step was using the sharpen tool to sharpen the firework burst and some of the skyscrapers.

In the end, I was very happy with how the Yankee Doodle Pops Firework images turned out with the issues that occurred during the shoot. Next time, I want to try for a higher vantage point to get away from other people and also get a better view of the city of Des Moines.

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