Panorama Day's - Fireworks on Lake Panorama's Jetty

On the Saturday of Panorama Day’s, fireworks were shot off the south shore of Lake Panorama at dusk so I headed out on the jetty with my D90, tripod, bug spray and lawn chair to capture the explosions of bright colors over the main basin.

My D90 had returned from getting worked on so I was back to normal with my set up to see the playback screen and use my Hahnel remote control to trigger the shutter. I used both the 24-120mm and 12-24mm lense to get the field of view I wanted and had the camera on my Slik tripod. As always when shooting fireworks, I had VR off, shutter set to Bulb and base ISO of 200. Aperture was set at f9 and manual focus was used as well. Exposures ranged from 2 to 26 seconds to try to time the explosions of the fireworks correctly. To help expose the lighthouse, I light painted the structure using a small LED flashlight while the camera was recording the firework burst.

Once in ViewNX, I did one minor adjustment as I changed the picture control to standard. However, I did use ViewNX to make exposure comp. adjustments on the images because I created HDR images out of all the scenes. By going with a 3 stop adjustment (+1, 0, -1) I was able to expose the wide range of highlights and shadows. I combined the 3 images in EasyHDR and used the Natural setting preset for HDR processing.

To finish the images, I used PSE 11 to put the final touches on the firework scenes. First I used the clone brush to get rid of unwanted objects such as the power box on the side of the lighthouse. The next adjustment was using level and layer masks to fine tune the exposure of the lighthouse while keeping the rest of the scene exposed correctly. I then used the noise reduction filter to reduce the noise in the image and sharpened the image with the high pass filter. The straighten and crop tool were the final steps done on the images.

Another tool I used in PSE 11 on images #15 and #16 allowed me to merge the firework burst with the lighthouse and background of image #17.  I aligned the two image layers together and under blending mode, changed one of the layers to lighter color. This allowed the brighter color of the two different images to come forward resulting in a very cool image.

The last firework photographs of the year turned out well once again and I look forward to future outings of shooting fireworks as it’s all about hitting and releasing the shutter at the right time.

#1.

 
#2.

 
#3.

 
#4.

 
#5.

 
#6.

 
#7.

 
#8.

 
#9.

 
#11.

 
#12.

 
#13.

 
#14.

 
#15.

 
#16.

 
 #17.

 
#18.

 
#19.

Tiger Lilies Up Close

Back in June, bright pink and white tiger lilies were in full bloom and on a calm night, I was able to get out and take photographs of these beautiful flowers.

I like to get up close to the lilies so I used my Zeikos extension tubes on the 24-120 lense and the D90. Because I’m shooting macro, I put the camera on my tripod and use a 5 second self timer to keep camera vibration to a minimum. I manual focus and had VR off on the lense. Shooting in RAW, the aperture was right around f18 or f22 in ISO 200 or 400. Exposure compensation was also adjusted and I added in the SB-700 speed light too. I took different photographs with the flash at different angles.

Once uploaded in ViewNX, I changed the white balance to direct sunlight and used three different picture controls (standard, landscape, nature-landscape). Highlight and shadow sliders were also adjusted to fine tune the image. I did create a couple HDR images so I processed them like in the past by creating multiple exposed images and merging them together in Easy HDR.

Photoshop Elements 11 put the final touches on the image using the clone brush tool, levels layer, and high pass filter. The clone brush helped me get rid of unwanted insects that flew into the frame while taking the picture and the levels layer helped with exposure. I used the high pass filter to sharpen the image when I was done.

While getting my D90 fixed, I rented the Nikon D7100 for 10 days and took a few close up flower shots as well to see how it compared to the D90. The increased resolution between the cameras is visible as the D7100 picks up more detail on the orange flower in my mind. I only took a dozen shots of flowers with the D7100 but used it a couple nights at the golf course so I look forward to processing them.

#1.

 
#2.

 
#3.

 
#4.

 
#5. Bokeh filter as background

 
#6. HDR

 
#7.

 
#8.

 
#9.

 
#10. HDR

 

#11. Taken with D7100

 
#12. Taken with D7100

 
#13. Taken with D7100

4th of July Fireworks - Lake Panorama

A day after the 4^th of July, Lake Panorama set off their fireworks at dusk so I headed to the marina and set up my camera to get the water, lighthouse and firework bursts in the same shot.

Now after having trouble with the D90 the previous shoots, tonight my Hahnel remote and lcd display did not work at all. This forced me to use the shutter button on my camera which caused these images not to be as sharp as I would like. I still had the 24-120mm on the camera set to manual focus and VR off. The Slik tripod was used but as I mentioned above, even with a sturdy tripod, hitting the shutter button still caused some blurriness in these longer exposed shots. Manual exposure was set to bulb and either f11 or f14 aperture. Exposures ranged from 2-20 seconds in ISO 200 shooting in RAW and exposure compensation at 0.

I either processed these images as HDR’s or used Adobe Camera RAW to adjust the files. For the HDR images, I created different files using View NX by changing the exposure compensation. Easy HDR was then used to merge the files and process them into HDR images. Adobe Camera RAW allowed me to boost the shadows to better expose the lighthouse without greatly affecting the rest of the image on the files I didn’t turn into HDR. I also used the charity, vibrance and saturation sliders in this program.

To finalize the firework images, I used PSE 11 by using a levels layer, clone brush, sharpen tool and straighten/crop 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 and lighthouse to sharpen those areas. The final step was to straighten the image and crop if needed.

While taking the photographs, I moved up and down the marina shore and ended up trying to get the fireworks directly behind the lighthouse. Having never done this before, it was an experiment and the photographs turned out fairly well.  A larger lense might be used the next time to really bring in the scene between the fireworks and lighthouse.

#1.

 
#2.

 
#3.

 
#4.

 
#5.

 
#6.

 
#7.

 
#8.