Lake Panorama Fireworks

The last firework display for Lake Panorama was Saturday night so just like the night before, I headed to the marina to take pictures. I switched up locations to get the lighthouse in the right hand corner and the fireworks in the left hand corner of the images.

I placed the Nikon D90 on my Slik tripod next to the water’s edge and got ready to shoot. I started taking images with the Nikon 18-105mm and after some shots with that, switched to the Sigma 50-150mm. On both lenses, I had autofocus and VR off while manually focusing on the lighthouse. Once again, I shot in RAW, ISO of 200 and in manual mode with an aperture of f11 and blub. Exposure ranged from 5 to 20 seconds to capture the distant fireworks.

Once in ViewNX, I made adjustments to exposure compensation to increase the brightness of the image while changing the white balance to direct sun light. Having done my fair share of firework images this summer, I decided to create a new picture control curve to enhance them so I used it on this album. The final adjustment was adjusting the highlight protection slider.

Final processing was done in PSE8 with adjustments made with the clone brush, hue/saturation and layer masks. I once again used the clone brush to clone over unwanted objects in the images and also increased the saturation. Different layer masks helped me brush out the areas I wanted to be affected by these adjustments. A high pass sharpening layer set to 20-40% opacity was done last to sharpen the strikes of fireworks.

With all my firework photographs processed from the 4^th of July, I’m very pleased with what I was able to capture on camera. On this shoot, my final image was a long exposure of the lighthouse which allowed me to use the image in multiple images by cutting and pasting a good exposure of the lighthouse over one that was not as exposed.

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Lake Panorama Marina Fireworks

On the weekend of the 4th of July, Friday night was the first of two firework displays that were held at Lake Panorama. Knowing these fireworks were going to be shot off right next to the lighthouse on the main basin of the Lake, I had to be there with my camera so I arrived early and found myself a good spot to set up.

Once again, I used my Slik tripod to hold the D90 and put it on top of a picnic table to get the angle I wanted. I originally had the Sigma 50-150mm lense on but when the first firework blast went off, I needed a much wider angled lense so I went with the Nikon 18-105mm. I turned off autofocus and VR on the lense and focused at the lighthouse. Using RAW, base ISO of 200 and the camera set to manual mode, I used an f9 aperture and blub. Because I had such good luck with the Hahnel remote, I used it again to trip the shutter. This time my exposures ranged from 5 to 15 seconds to capture the strikes of the fireworks.

In ViewNX, I adjusted the exposure compensation, white balance, picture control and D-lighting HS sliders. The first and the forth sliders were used to brighten the fireworks and main basin of the Lake while the wb and picture control were used to enhance the color of the image. The white balance was changed to direct sunlight and picture control to nature-landscape.

I uploaded the tiff files into PSE8 and used the clone brush, action curves, hue/saturation and different layer masks to add the finishing touches on the fireworks. The clone brush helped get rid of unwanted items on the water while the other adjustments helped with the contrast and brightness of the image. Using layer masks allowed me to brush out what I wanted affected or not affected. The final step was using the high pass sharpening layer to sharpen up the images.

For the first time when taking firework photographs, I changed my camera to a portrait orientation from landscape on a number of these and some of them turned out to be some of my favorites. Always learning and changing my techniques to get better photographs.

Next up will be fireworks from Shady Beach at Lake Panorama taken from the main basin that have a number of keepers in them.

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Yale's 4th of July Fireworks

On Independence Day, Yale had its annual 4^th of July celebration and the day ended with shooting off fireworks. After getting off work, I gathered up my camera gear and drove west of town and parked along highway 4 to get a good spot to shoot from. I wanted to get the FC-Coop in one corner of the photograph and fireworks in the other to add to the depth of the image.

I decided the bed of my truck would make a great place to shoot from so I set up my gear. Because I was going to be shooting long exposures, I used my Slik tripod and fitted the D90 with the Sigma 50-150 lense. I turned off autofocus and set the lense to infinity to keep things in focus. I shot in RAW and turned off long exposure noise reduction to speed up the time the camera took to process the image. I used manual mode with an aperture of f9 or f11 and the shutter set to bulb. Bulb allowed me to keep the shutter open as long as I held down the release button on my Hahnel remote. The length was between 15 to 30 seconds for these photographs.

Once in ViewNX, I changed the picture control to custom nature-landscape setting and adjusted the exposure compensation to increase the exposure of the images. This helped brighten the fireworks and background. The camera did a good job on white balance so I did not change the setting.

I finished off the images in PSE8 by using a levels layer, layer masks and high pass sharpening layer. The levels layer was used to add saturation to the fireworks and then I brushed out areas I did not want affected with the use of layer masks.  The final step was to sharpen the image so I used a high pass sharpening layer. I didn’t want the full sharpening affect, so I changed the layer mode to overlay and adjusted the opacity to around 30%.

This was about the third time I’ve shot fireworks with this camera and for the first time, used my Hahnel remote which proved very helpful. It allowed me not to touch the camera and watch the fireworks so it was easier to hit the shutter as soon as they were fired off.

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