Tuesday, August 14, 2018

Panorama Day Fireworks on Lake Panorama - 18 Edition

Equipment Used: Nikon D750, Tamron 24-70 mm f2.8 G2 lense, Nikon SB-700 Speedlights on Vello Wireless Flash triggers, Vanguard Abel Plus 363CT & Slik Pro tripod, Viltrox Remote Control, Lightroom & Photoshop CC

This year, Panorama Day’s fireworks were set off on Friday night so I walked out to the lighthouse on the main basin of Lake Panorama and waited for them to go off on the south shore.  After having an issue with misfocused images during the 4th of July, I made sure the lense was focused correctly.

I put the D750 on the VanGuard tripod and attached the Viltrox Remote Control on the camera while putting the SB-700 Speedlight on the Slik tripod. The Vello wireless flash trigger was attached to the speedlight. I shot at an aperture of f9.0 and ISO 400 while the lense was at 35mm. Shutter speeds ranged from 1 to 10 seconds. While the camera was capturing the firework bursts, I’d hit the trigger to set off my speedlight to light up the lighthouse.

The images were first batch processed in Lightroom by using the firework presets that I’ve developed since last summer. I then adjusted the images individually for exposure and saturation while adding radial filter to reduce the exposure of the grass on the jetty below the lighthouse. These processed files were then exported as TIFF’s to Photoshop.

The first step in PS was using the clone or healing brush to get rid of unwanted objects in the images. About the only object that needed remover was a Canada goose that stood on the end of the jetty by the lighthouse during the firework show, imagine that! The fireworks were shot off with some going left while others went right which allowed me to blend multiple images together to get a bigger more dramatic burst of fireworks. To do this, I used layer masks and different blending modes. I also took the best exposed lighthouse image and used it on different images as well. I added some vibrancy to the firework bursts by using the vibrance layer as well.

The panoramic image was taken before the fireworks were going off so after combining those images in LR, I then added the fireworks using PS that I captured later.

At the end of the firework show, I then turned my camera towards the condo’s and the Port to capture that scene that overlooks Lake Panorama.


I’m very pleased with how these fireworks turned out and can’t wait to put them on metal prints and drink coasters. 

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