Lake Panorama's 4th of July Fireworks 16

Equipment Used:  Nikon D750, 24-120 f4 lense, Silk Pro 500DX Tripod & Viltrox Wireless Remote control

Over the 4^th of July weekend, Lake Panorama had their firework show so I headed down to Boulder Beach with my camera and got to the point along the shore to get a good view. Last year I was at the same location and had some good images so hoped for more of the same this year. I had planned on using both the D750 and D90 on tripods but when I started sitting up the equipment, I didn’t have both tripod plates.

So I put the D750 on the Slik tripod fitted with the 24-120 mm lense and hooked up the remote control as well. Manual focus was used along with turning off VR on the lense. Manual mode was set to bulb and I adjusted the aperture between f5.6-9.  ISO was 400.  Exposures ranged from 5 to 15 seconds to capture the fireworks.

I started processing the images in Capture NX-D with adjustments to exposure compensation, white balance, picture control and highlight/shadow sliders. White balance was changed to direct sunlight and picture control to landscape. I increased the shadow slider to help lighten up the area of the boats on the water. I also made a copy of the RAW file to further lighten up the area of the boats using the exposure compensation.

Using PSE 11, I merged files together using layers and the brush tool to help get a great looking firework burst along with the boats being exposed in a better manner. After that, I used the clone brush tool to get rid of unwanted objects such as a cell phone towers red light in the background. I than straightened the image if need be and sharpened it as well.

The sky wasn’t quite as good for taking firework shots as last year it seemed when viewing these images but I still was able to capture some cool bursts. Next year I’ll be looking for a new location to shoot from to hopefully get more of a look down towards the boats. 

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