Panorama Days Fireworks

The first weekend in August was Panorama Days with a fireworks show off the main basin of Lake Panorama along with a boat parade making for another opportunity for me to capture fireworks over water. I decided to shoot from the top of a deck to get a different perspective of the main basin.

The Nikon D90 was placed on my Slik tripod with the 18-105mm lense to capture the fireworks, main basin and boats. I turned off autofocus and VR on the lense and focused on the lighthouse to hopefully make the whole image sharp. Shooting in RAW with a base ISO of 200, I had my camera in manual mode with an aperture of f11 and blub. I used an exposure time of 3 to 25 seconds to get these images.

In ViewNX, I made adjustments to the white balance, picture control and highlight/shadow sliders to enhance the images. A direct sunlight setting was used for the white balance while the custom golf course sunrise and firework picture control was used to enhance color.

To finalize the images, I used PSE8 to make the last bit of adjustments to the images. The clone brush was used to get rid of unwanted objects in the sky and on the water. I wanted the fireworks to be brighter in color so I used a saturation layer to add more pop into them while brushing out areas I did not wanted affected. A final high pass sharpening layer set at 30% opacity and in overlay mode was done last to sharpen the streaks of the fireworks.

The longer exposure times were shot after the fireworks to get the long streaks of light from the boats that started to move around the main basin. Something different that I tried that resulted in something neat on the computer.

#1.

 
#2.

 
#3.

 
#4.

 
#5.

 
#6.

 
#7.

 
#8.

 
#9.

 
#10.

 
#11.

 
#12.

 
#13.

 
#14.