Panorama Days Fireworks over Lake Panorama Lighthouse

Equipment Used: Nikon D750, Nikon 24-120mm f4, VanGuard Abeo Plus 363CT tripod, Viltrox Remote Control, Lightroom & Photoshop CC

Panorama Days marks the last event of the summer to capture fireworks in the area.  I was glad to see that the rain had moved out of the area by late afternoon and mostly clear skies had rolled in. Just before sunset, I left work and got to the jetty and got my equipment set up by the lighthouse on the main basin of Lake Panorama.

My usual set up for firework captures included my camera and lense, tripod and remote control plus a chair to set in while taking the images. On the D750, settings included having the ISO at 200 during the fireworks and then IS0 800 afterwards. Aperture ranged from f9 – f14 resulting in exposures of 10 to 20 seconds to capture the burst of fireworks. The remote control was used to trigger the camera once the firework was fired off the ground and then released when I decided I had captured the firework bursts that I wanted too.

I just used Lightroom CC to adjust these images and used my preset firework setting to help start processing them. I had created the firework preset after working on the 4^th of July images. Having this preset helped me save time post processing these images. Depending on the color of the fireworks, I then further adjusted saturation on the HSL tab.  

To finish off these images, I used Photoshop CC to get rid of unwanted objects in the scene using the clone and patch tool brush. Saturation and exposure adjustment layers and the brush tool were used to further enhance the fireworks or the lighthouse exposure.

The firework shows are now over for the summer and I missed out capturing this show by just a few days with another new lense, the Tamron 24-70mm f2.8 G2 that arrived a few days later.  Looking forward to testing the Tamron this fall. 

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Lake Panorama Summer Scenes on the Main Basin

Equipment Used: Nikon D750, Tokina 28-70mm f2.8 AT-X Lense, Nikon 24-120mm f4, Nikon 70-300mm f4-f5.6, Capture NX-D, Lightroom & Photoshop CC

The main basin at Lake Panorama during a summer day makes for the ability to capture blue skies, boats, water and the lighthouse all at once. When cumulus clouds were rolling through the sky, I headed over with my camera and started capturing the scene.

I fitted the D750 with different lenses depending on the location I was at and whether I was trying to capture the flag in the image as well. When I used the Tokina lense, I put a polarizing filter on to enhance the sky and the water. Shooting in aperture priority mode, the aperture was between f7.1 and f9 while I kept the ISO at 200.

I used Capture NX-D and Lightroom CC to process the RAW files. Using NX-D, I changed the white balance to sunlight and picture control to nature-landscape. Exposure compensation was adjusted as well along with the hightlight/shadow sliders. In Lightroom, I used the contrast, highlights, shadows, whites, blacks, clarity, vibrance and dehaze sliders.

The final step used Photoshop CC to get rid of unwanted objects in the scene such has the buoy and boat docks along the jetty. To improve the color of the water, I used a cooling filter layer with a small opacity level to give it a blue tint. The brush tool was used to erase areas of the image I didn’t want the blue tint on the layer mask. 

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