D750 - Panorama Day Fireworks on Lake Panorama 19
Equipment Used: Nikon D750, Tamron 24-70mm f2.8 G2 lense, SB-700 Speedlight, VanGuard Abel Plus 363CT tripod , Lightroom & Photoshop CC
After packing up from the Panorama Days vendor show, I waited til dusk to walk out to the lighthouse on Lake Panorama and get my camera equipment set up for the fireworks. After getting the camera on the tripod and my settings dialed in, I checked the focus on the lighthouse and also the general area where the fireworks were getting shot off from and I was good to go.
The D750 was set to an aperture of f7.1 with an ISO of 640 and shutter set to bulb mode. I used Viltrox remote to trigger the camera and the shutter speeds ranged from 5 to 9 seconds to capture the firework bursts. The Tamron lense was set at 29mm. To increase the exposure of the lighthouse, I used the SB-700 speed light while the camera’s shutter was open by manually setting off the flash. To get the starburst effect from the light on the lighthouse, I went down to an aperture of f16 on in image I took after the fireworks were completely done.
In Lightroom, I was able to use a preset I created last year on this collection of images. This preset had an increase to exposure, clarity, dehaze, vibrance and saturation while a decrease in highlights and shadows. It also featured a gradulated filter on the bottom of the image that increased exposure. The HSL tab had increases in saturation to red, orange, yellow and blue. If another color was present in the fireworks, I bumped that saturation up as well.
In Photoshop, the healing and clone brushes were used to get rid of unwanted objects in the sky like cell phone tower and a streak of red light that was next to the lighthouse. By selecting the firework image and the starburst effect lighthouse image in LR, I opened both of them as layers in PS directly which allowed the program to align them automatically. The opacity level was changed to lighten which allowed the brightest part of the two images to come through one another. This allowed both the lighthouse and its starburst light to look natural with the firework bursts. To finish off the color of the fireworks, I increased the vibrance using a layer mask. I then cropped the image to complete the post processing.
