Lake Panorama - Fire in the Sky 2015 (D750)

Equipment Used: Nikon D750 with a 24-120mm f4 lense, Viltrox Remote & Slik Pro 500DX tripod.

With a rented D750, I was excited for the 4^th of July weekend and Lake Panorama’s Fire in the Sky firework show. I wanted to see what a full frame camera could do compared to my D90 so I had them set up side by side. I had a new location to shoot from which resulted in capturing not only the fireworks, but the many boats on the water.

Just like the D90, I had the D750 shooting in RAW and in manual mode after turning the autofocus and VR off on the lense. The shutter speed was set to bulb and aperture at f9. ISO was at 200. Exposure time ranged from 6 to 27 seconds. During the firework show, I started out wider with the lense and then kept zooming in along with changing to a portrait orientation. I had a remote in each hand for the two cameras so tried to capture different series of fireworks but ended up getting many that were similar.

One feature of the D750 that I didn’t expect to use or like that much was the tilted screen but after using the camera on a tripod and in different situations, the tilted screen is very useful.

In order to process the D750’s RAW files, I had to download Capture NX-D. Just like on the D90 files, I adjusted the exposure compensation, picture control, saturation slider and highlight/shadow slider. With the much newer sensor technology and being full frame, I was able to lift the shadows with a much cleaner look on the D750 compared to the D90. A couple of the images were turned into HDR’s so I adjusted the exposure compensation on them from -0.5 to +3. I choice the Natural setting in Easy HDR for the processing that program does to create HDR images.

In PSE 11, I did the same steps to finalize the images as I did for the D90 firework shots. In doing so during periods that I was zooming in, the quality of the files as far as noise was visible between the two cameras.

Using a two camera set up for the first time, was a joy to use as it allowed me to get different angles of the fireworks and have more images to share.  I’m looking forward to having the set up again in the future.

 

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Lake Panorama - Fire in the Sky 2015 (D90)

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

Over the 4^th 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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Astrophotography on the Farm (Edition I)

Equipment Used: Nikon D90 with 12-24mm f4 lense, Nikon SB-700 Speedlight, Slik Pro 500DX tripod, Viltrox Remote & an led flashlight.

One of the goals for the summer was to get out on clear nights and try to capture the stars over different landscapes. So far this summer, it has been tough as the majority of nights have been cloudy but I’ve managed to get out twice and capture the below images.

In order to capture these images, I used the above equipment which allowed me to vary the exposure times. Shooting in RAW and in manual mode, I had the shutter speed on bulb and aperture at f4.  Exposure time ranged from 30 seconds to 15 minutes. ISO was either at 800 or 1600. Autofocus & VR were turned off on the lense. During the exposure to light up the foreground, I used the SB-700 or led flashlight. The SB-700 has a flash-ready indicator light which can also be pushed to fire off the flash at the set power. By stepping away from the corn crib and barn 30-50 yards, I was able to use the flash to expose the whole side of the buildings.

In View NX, I adjusted the exposure compensation, white balance and picture control if needed. Exposure compensation was increased, white balance set at direct sunlight or original and picture control at standard or golf course (custom curve created using Nikon’s picture control utility). I than outputted them into Tiff files to work on them in PSE 11.

Once in PSE 11, I worked on cloning out some of the hot pixels and combining images using layer masks. I only had a couple images were I lit up the foreground of the corn crib, barn and corn so I combined those into other images were I was concerned on getting a good sky exposure. It worked well. The final step was to crop and sharpen the final image.

After capturing the starry night sky, I look forward to getting out there again and improving my technique. For a week during the 4^th of July, I rented the D750 which I wanted to put to the test at night but unfortunately, the night skies have been cloudy.

 

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Summer Scene on Lake Panorama's Main Basin

Equipment Used: Nikon D90 with 24-120 f4 and 70-300 f4.5-5.6 lense.

After getting off work on a Sunday afternoon, the main basin of Lake Panorama was busy with boaters enjoying the summer sun so I stopped and got out my camera to capture the scene.

I started off using the longer lense from the above equipment list on my camera and had the following settings on the camera: RAW, aperture mode, f10 and ISO 200. I walked around the hill side of the marina and then walked down to the docks were I switched to the 24-120mm lense. The same settings were used for this lense as well. I was shooting in the afternoon towards the sun so the conditions weren’t 100% perfect.

In View NX, I changed the white balance to direct sunlight and picture control to golf course (custom curve created using Nikon’s picture control utility). The highlight/shadow slider was also adjusted if needed. I wanted to create HDR images with these, so I copied the files and adjusted the exposure compensation to -1, 0 and +1. Those files were outputted as 16 bit Tiff’s into Easy HDR were I merged them together using that software.

The HDR outputted images were then finalized in PSE 11. I cloned out unwanted objects in the images along with using a curves layer to increase the sky contrast if needed. The final steps included straightening the image, cropping and sharpening the images.

 

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