D7200 - 4th of July Fireworks 19 on Lake Panorama
Equipment Used: Nikon D7200, Tamron 70-200mm f2.8 G2 lense, Slik Pro tripod , Lightroom & Photoshop CC
After finishing set up of the D750 on its tripod, I put the D7200 right next to it on its own tripod so I could shoot both cameras at the same time while watching the fireworks. With the 70-200mm lense on the camera and the D7200 1.5 crop factor, I put it in portrait orientation on the tripod to take vertical images.
After checking the focus on the lense, I turned autofocus and VR off and had the camera in manual mode. The aperture was f8 while the shutter was in bulb to allow me to hit the remote shutter control to change the length of exposure. This collection of images, the shutter ranged from 5 to 12 seconds. ISO was at 400 and the lense was right at 70mm.
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. Two graduated filters were used over the water and boat area, one increased the brightness of the boats while the other darkened the water. 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 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. A vibrance layer was used to increase the color of the firework bursts as well in PS.
