D750 - 4th of July Fireworks 19 on Lake Panorama

Equipment Used: Nikon D750, Tamron 24-70mm f2.8 G2 lense, VanGuard Abel Plus 363CT tripod , Lightroom & Photoshop CC

A beautiful night for the fireworks show on Lake Panorama resulted in me getting to my usual shooting location near dusk to set up my cameras and wait for the first burst. After having weather issues for Yale’s fireworks, I was glad to see not a cloud in the sky.

After setting up my camera and tripod, I focused to infinity and shut off autofocus and VR on the lense and set the camera to bulb and f11. I went with an aperture of f11 to help get starbursts on the boat lights. ISO was 640. Shutter speed ranged from 5 to 23 seconds to capture single or multiple firework explosions.  I used the viltrox remote to trigger the camera.

In Lightroom, after editing the first image, I created a preset using those settings to save time on the rest of the images. This preset had adjustments to the majority of the sliders in the basic tab along with increases of saturation and noise reduction. Depending on the colors in the fireworks, I adjusted different saturation sliders to increase that particular color.  A radial filter was used over the water and boats to increase the brightness in that particular area.  The final step was to crop the image and import it into Photoshop.

Once in Photoshop, I got rid of unwanted objects in the image like a small log that was floating in the water and then the cell phone tower in the background using the healing and clone brushes. I also cloned out some of the smoke coming off the fireworks as well to make the image cleaner.

After last year’s mistake of slightly moving the focus on the lense, I was glad to see that these images were in focus. The lense was at 46mm so I could have zoomed in alittle closer but overall, was happy with these results.  The D7200 images that will be posted next are zoomed in since that camera body had the Tamron 70-200mm lense on it.