4th of July Fireworks - Lake Panorama

A day after the 4^th of July, Lake Panorama set off their fireworks at dusk so I headed to the marina and set up my camera to get the water, lighthouse and firework bursts in the same shot.

Now after having trouble with the D90 the previous shoots, tonight my Hahnel remote and lcd display did not work at all. This forced me to use the shutter button on my camera which caused these images not to be as sharp as I would like. I still had the 24-120mm on the camera set to manual focus and VR off. The Slik tripod was used but as I mentioned above, even with a sturdy tripod, hitting the shutter button still caused some blurriness in these longer exposed shots. Manual exposure was set to bulb and either f11 or f14 aperture. Exposures ranged from 2-20 seconds in ISO 200 shooting in RAW and exposure compensation at 0.

I either processed these images as HDR’s or used Adobe Camera RAW to adjust the files. For the HDR images, I created different files using View NX by changing the exposure compensation. Easy HDR was then used to merge the files and process them into HDR images. Adobe Camera RAW allowed me to boost the shadows to better expose the lighthouse without greatly affecting the rest of the image on the files I didn’t turn into HDR. I also used the charity, vibrance and saturation sliders in this program.

To finalize the firework images, I used PSE 11 by using a levels layer, clone brush, sharpen tool and straighten/crop 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 and lighthouse to sharpen those areas. The final step was to straighten the image and crop if needed.

While taking the photographs, I moved up and down the marina shore and ended up trying to get the fireworks directly behind the lighthouse. Having never done this before, it was an experiment and the photographs turned out fairly well.  A larger lense might be used the next time to really bring in the scene between the fireworks and lighthouse.

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