Panorama Day's - Fireworks on Lake Panorama's Jetty

On the Saturday of Panorama Day’s, fireworks were shot off the south shore of Lake Panorama at dusk so I headed out on the jetty with my D90, tripod, bug spray and lawn chair to capture the explosions of bright colors over the main basin.

My D90 had returned from getting worked on so I was back to normal with my set up to see the playback screen and use my Hahnel remote control to trigger the shutter. I used both the 24-120mm and 12-24mm lense to get the field of view I wanted and had the camera on my Slik tripod. As always when shooting fireworks, I had VR off, shutter set to Bulb and base ISO of 200. Aperture was set at f9 and manual focus was used as well. Exposures ranged from 2 to 26 seconds to try to time the explosions of the fireworks correctly. To help expose the lighthouse, I light painted the structure using a small LED flashlight while the camera was recording the firework burst.

Once in ViewNX, I did one minor adjustment as I changed the picture control to standard. However, I did use ViewNX to make exposure comp. adjustments on the images because I created HDR images out of all the scenes. By going with a 3 stop adjustment (+1, 0, -1) I was able to expose the wide range of highlights and shadows. I combined the 3 images in EasyHDR and used the Natural setting preset for HDR processing.

To finish the images, I used PSE 11 to put the final touches on the firework scenes. First I used the clone brush to get rid of unwanted objects such as the power box on the side of the lighthouse. The next adjustment was using level and layer masks to fine tune the exposure of the lighthouse while keeping the rest of the scene exposed correctly. I then used the noise reduction filter to reduce the noise in the image and sharpened the image with the high pass filter. The straighten and crop tool were the final steps done on the images.

Another tool I used in PSE 11 on images #15 and #16 allowed me to merge the firework burst with the lighthouse and background of image #17.  I aligned the two image layers together and under blending mode, changed one of the layers to lighter color. This allowed the brighter color of the two different images to come forward resulting in a very cool image.

The last firework photographs of the year turned out well once again and I look forward to future outings of shooting fireworks as it’s all about hitting and releasing the shutter at the right time.

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