Panorama Days Fireworks over the Lake Lighthouse

The first weekend of August this year celebrated Panorama Days and on Friday night, fireworks were shot off the south shore of Lake Panorama above the main basin. I had inside knowledge of this location and the ability to get out on the jetty right next to the lighthouse to have that landmark in the image. While waiting for the first burst of fireworks, I also took photographs of the Port and Lakeside Inn.

Since I was shooting in the dark, I placed the D90 on the Slik tripod and switched between the Nikkor 24-120mm and 12-24mm lense depending on how close I got to the lighthouse. Manual focus and VR turned off helped me get sharp images during the long exposures. For the Port images, I had an ISO of 800 while the fireworks were shot at ISO 200. With the camera set in manual mode, I had an aperture of f7.1 or f9 and had an exposure ranging from 15 to 30 seconds. The fireworks exploded in different locations of the sky which helped me shoot longer and combine multiple bursts.

The technique called light painting was also used on the lighthouse to increase the exposure on the building by using a small LED flashlight. Having my camera set up with the Hahnel Wireless Remote allowed me to move around and “paint” the lighthouse with light from the flashlight. I would later use these images in post processing to combine them with the firework images.

In ViewNX the images of the Port were processed by changing the white balance to shade and the picture control to Nature-Landscape. I also adjusted the highlight/shadow slider if needed. On the firework images I left the white balance alone but changed the picture control to Firework. The highlight/shadow sliders were also adjusted. To create the HDR images, I changed the exposure compensations from -1 to +1 on five images so I could combine them in EasyHDR.

Once in PSE 11, my first step was using the clone brush to get rid of unwanted objects throughout the scene of the image. Shooting long exposures in darkness, I’ve found that sometimes you get weird lights in the skies so using the clone brush helps clean those up. Because I had images of the lighthouse being light painted that exposed it brighter, I merged them into the images of the fireworks. Layer masks and adjusting the opacity of that layer allowed me to merge the two together in a natural manner. The last step involved using the sharpening tool just on the firework burst and straighten/cropping the image.

As the summer winds down, I’ll be switching gears to taking photographs of the hunting seasons and harvest. I can’t wait to see the brightly colored fall

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Golden Tassels over Farmers Cooperative

The dog days of summer have produced some beautiful colored skies and with a great view of a corn field and the co-op, I took the opportunity to capture these scenes. This evening I set up my camera on top of the Ranger to get above the growing corn and waited for the golden light from the setting sun.

 

The D90 was fitted with the 24-120mm lense and I used the camera both on and off the tripod. When on the tripod, I turned off VR on the lense and kept it on when handholding the camera. Depending on the focus point I wanted in the scene, I either used manual focus or let the autofocus do the work. I was shooting right into the sun so I kept the ISO low at 200 and even reduced the exposure compensation. I had the dial on the D90 set at aperture priority or manual and ranged the aperture from f9-22. I also used the SB-700 Speedlight to light up the corn plants directly in front of me. The D90 pop-up flash triggered the 700 with it being in remote mode and the power on the flash ranged between 1/64 to 1/1.

Nikon’s ViewNX was used to process the RAW files into Tiff’s but first, a few adjustments were made. To help increase the orange tint in the images, I changed the white balance to Shade and then changed the picture control to my Nature-Landscape. Doing these two adjustments darkened the images so to brighten them up again; I used the exposure compensation and shadow protection slider.

I used PSE11 to do the final processing on the images by first cloning out unwanted objects with the clone brush. Next step involved layer masks and gradients to merge selected images together if I wanted to showcase the foreground or background. The second to last step was the use of the high pass sharpening filter followed by layer masks/brush tool to paint over areas that I didn’t want sharpened. The last step was using the crop tool if needed.

I’m also using a new frame for the first time on these photographs that offers the actual image a larger area inside the frame.  I got the advice from a fellow photographer that my old frame was taking too much away from the photograph because the frame and mat was too large on the web.

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