Friday, July 21, 2017

Lake Panorama 4th of July Fire in the Sky - 17 Edition

Equipment Used: Nikon D750, Tokina 28-70mm f2.8 AT-X Lense, VanGuard Abel Plus 363CT Tripod, Viltrox Remote Control, Capture NX-D, Lightroom & Photoshop CC

Lake Panoramas 4th of July fireworks were enjoyed by boaters and other spectators a few days earlier then the 4th since it fell on a Tuesday this year.  That Saturday night, I took a break from a work at the restaurant and drove down to the beach to capture the firework bursts over the boats.

With a week left before I had to return the Tokina lense, I tested it out shooting fireworks by placing it on the D750 and mounting the rig on the VanGuard tripod. I discovered that the location of the focus ring that I had used for taking milky way images didn’t provide sharp images of the fireworks so I had to do some adjusting. I shot in RAW using manual mode with the shutter speed set on bulb and aperture f7.1.  ISO ranged from as low as 100 to a high of 3200. The Viltrox remote was used to trigger the camera and I held it down between 8 to 20 seconds to capture these fireworks.

To process the images, the majority of the time I used Lightroom and adjusted the white balance to daylight as my first step. Next came adjustments to clarity, vibrance, saturation, noise reduction and dehaze sliders. In the HSL tab, I used the color specific saturation sliders to bump up the saturation of the certain colors of the firework bursts. Graduated filter tool was used on the sky and firework burst part of the image as well. Finally I used the adjustment brush to lighten the bottom area of the image so the water and boats were visible.

The last part of processing used Photoshop with the patch and clone tools to get rid of unwanted objects on these images. This included a buoy in the center of the boats and a cell phone tower along the tree line. A  brightness/contrast layer mask was used to fine tune the look of the sky and fireworks to put the final touches on the images.

The firework show was a great display over the surrounding scence of water and boats with hundreds of people watching the show. 

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1 comment:

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