Yale fireworks on the 4th of July

To finish off the 4^th of July weekend, Yale had its fireworks on Monday night. After getting off work, I decided to take some more firework images. I decided to set up in the bed of my truck with the camera to be able to get a view over the corn field and get Yale’s FC coop in the image as well.

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 sky was darker then it was on Saturday night at Lake Panorama so I held the shutter a little bit longer.

The images were processed as RAW files in ViewNX 2.0 with adjustments to the white balance, picture control, color booster and D-lighting HS. The white balance was set to either cloudy, direct sunlight or left alone to make the sky different shades of color while the picture control was mostly set at Nature-Landscape. The color booster and D-lighting HS sliders were also used on the low side to increase contrast and lighten up the image. Unlike the Lake Panorama firework images with the lighthouse, when processing the images, I decided the coop could remain mostly black.

I finalized the images in PSE8 with the crop and cloning tool to remove unwanted lights and other items in the image that occur when shooting longer exposures.

On a side note, I discovered the on/off button on my camera no longer works which will require a three or four week turnaround to get it fixed. The camera stays on and functions regardless of it being turned off. What a bummer! I will have to decide the correct time frame to be without my camera.

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