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.
#1.
#2.
#3.
#4.
#5.
#6.
#7.
#8.
#9.
#10.
#11.
#12.
#13.
#14.
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