Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Lake Panorama - Fire in the Sky 2015 (D90)


Equipment Used: Nikon D90 with 30mm f1.8 lense, Hahnel remote control & a tripod.

Over the 4th of July weekend, Lake Panorama held its annual Fire in the Sky fireworks show and like I’ve done over the past few years, I head out with my camera and try to capture the bright bursts of color in the sky. This year I went to a new location to get closer to the action and had two cameras set up, the D90 and D750.

To capture the fireworks, I shot in RAW and in manual mode after turning the autofocus off on the lense. The shutter speed was set to bulb and aperture at f9. ISO was at 400 which is low considering I’m shooting in the dark but the fireworks put out a ton of light. Exposure time ranged from 5 to 25 seconds. I let the D90 capture all landscape orientation images because the tripod I used for it is not near as stable as the Slik tripod.

Using Nikon’s Capture NX-D for the first time, I adjusted the exposure compensation, picture control, saturation slider and highlight/shadow slider. Depending on how bright I wanted the image, I either increased or decreased the exposure compensation. Picture control was changed to sport and saturation slider was set to +5. To increase the visibility of the boats on the water, I increased the shadow slider to around 50 while changing the highlight slider to 20. Only a few images were turned into HDR’s but I followed the same steps that I always do: change exposure compensation on multiple files and work on them using Easy HDR.

In PSE 11, the Tiff files from NX-D were finalized by cloning out unwanted items such as a pop bottle floating on the water or a cell phone towers red lights in the distance. If the brightness of the boats or fireworks needed further tweaking, I used layer masks and gradients to do that work. Finally, I rotated the image to make it was straight and sharpened the fireworks using the sharpen tool or a high pass filter.

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