Yale's 4th of July Fireworks

On the 4^th of July, I found myself along highway 4 looking towards Yale capturing their firework show. I used the bed of my truck for my shooting platform and set up my equipment.

The D90 was still giving me trouble even without using my Hahnel remote. The connection port for the remote was very loose which I thought was causing the lcd display not to work, but I was wrong. Once again, I had to set up my camera settings off of past experience. I had my camera on the Slik tripod and 24-120mm lense set to manual focus and VR off. I used either a 50mm or 75mm focal length to capture the scene. Manual exposure was set up bulb as the shutter speed and f9 as the aperture. Exposures ranged from 4 – 25 seconds in ISO 200. I also was in RAW and left the exposure compensation at 0.

Using View NX I processed the RAW files and was happy with a number of settings right out of the camera so I left the white balance alone and didn’t change the picture control on the majority of the images. On a few of them, I did change it to Landscape to help improve the color of the firework burst. Mostly I adjusted the exposure compensation and highlight/shadow sliders if need be. I did make a couple HDR images so I followed the same steps as I used in the previous post.

I then worked on the TIFF files from ViewNX using PSE 11 by using a levels layer, clone brush and the sharpen tool. Using the levels layer plus their layer masks allowed me to increase the brightness of certain areas of the image while keeping the other areas dark. The clone brush allowed me to get rid of unwanted objects and the sharpen tool was used mainly on the firework burst to sharpen that area. The final step was to straighten the image and crop if needed.

The last few years, I’ve been shooting the firework scene from highway 4 so next year I hope to get a different perspective by going to a different vintage point.

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Yankee Doodle Pops Fireworks - Des Moines, IA

Over the 4^th of July weekend, I found myself at a new venue to take firework photographs while spending time with my family. In downtown Des Moines at the capital, the Des Moines Symphony put on a great night of music followed by a splendid show of fireworks. Being a new venue, I didn’t know for sure were the fireworks would explode in the sky and how to deal with the number of people there. My D90 also threw me a curveball when the back monitor and a number of bottoms stopped working! I was unable to see how my long exposed shots were turning out because of this malfunction.

Because of the trouble with the camera, I went off past experience. I had the 24-120mm lense on the D90 and my Slik tripod placed on top of a flower bed to try to get above some of the spectators. I switched off VR and manual focused to infinity. I notched my control dial to manual and set the shutter speed at bulb and aperture at f11 and later in the show f16. I used my Hahnel remote to trigger the shutter and kept it held down while the fireworks went off. The exposures lasted between 3 and 15 seconds. I of course used the D90’s base ISO of 200 and shot in RAW.

The next day, I uploaded the files onto my laptop and was glad to see that my past experience had paid off and the images turned out pretty well for what I was dealt with. In View NX, I left the white balance unchanged and changed the picture control to Landscape. I also used the highlight slider if needed as well.  I took three of the images a step further into Easy HDR and made 5 different exposed images in ViewNX by changing the exposure compensation to create HDR images.

I ended the post processing in PSE 11 by first cloning out unwanted objects using the clone tool. The next step of using a levels layer and layer masks allowed me to fine tune the look of the firework explosions to help reduce blown high lights. Next came straighten the image using the rotate tool to get the skyscrapers looking right followed by cropping the image. The final step was using the sharpen tool to sharpen the firework burst and some of the skyscrapers.

In the end, I was very happy with how the Yankee Doodle Pops Firework images turned out with the issues that occurred during the shoot. Next time, I want to try for a higher vantage point to get away from other people and also get a better view of the city of Des Moines.

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