Monday, July 23, 2012

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 4th 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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