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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