4th of July Fireworks at Lake Panorama

The 4^th of July, the United States of America’s Independence Day is celebrated every year with grand firework displays all over this great nation. Last Saturday night, I was lucky enough to have great weather and a great opportunity to capture the fireworks on beautiful Lake Panorama.

I positioned myself where I could capture the Lake Panorama’s lighthouse along the fireworks shooting off in the distance. This position turned out to be perfect except without bug spray, the mosquitoes sure liked me as I stood alongside the water.

With the Slikpro 500DX tripod, the Nikon D90 and the 18-105mm lense zoomed in to capture what I wanted; I started shooting as the fireworks exploded in the sky. Since my camera was on a tripod, VR was shut off along with using manual focus since it was dark and I didn’t want the autofocus hunting. Fireworks are bright subjects so the ISO was set at 200 and I used Manual mode. Manual mode allowed me to set the shutter speed to “bulb” and hold the shutter open as long as I wanted to.

The images were processed in ViewNX 2.0 with adjustments to the white balance, picture control and D-lighting HS. The white balance was either left alone to what the D90 had picked for the shot or changed to cloudy. The picture control was adjusted to the custom Nature-Landscape control I created to help make the colors of the fireworks “pop” more. The adjustment that proved to be the best was the use of the D-lighting HS which allowed me to lighten the image without blowing out the fireworks. I wanted to faintly have the lighthouse visible in the image and the D-lighting HS allowed me to do that.

To finalize the images, I used the cloning tool in PSE8 to clone out unwanted lights and the boat docks along the jetty. The burn tool was also used to darken the lights from the houses off in the distance.

This was the first time the D90 was used on fireworks and I’m very happy with the results. A few years ago with my old Pentax dslr, I had to wait an extended amount of time between each shot while the camera processed the image. With the D90, there was no wait.

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