D7200 - 4th of July Fireworks 20 on Lake Panorama
D7200 – 4th of July Fireworks 20 on Lake Panorama
Equipment Used: Nikon D7200, Tamron 70-200mm f2.8 lense, Silk Pro Tripod, Lightroom and Photoshop CC
With everything going on in the country, I was glad to hear that the fireworks on Lake Panorama would happen in 2020 so I headed to my usual location to watch and take pictures with my two cameras on Saturday night.
I set up the D7200 on the Silk Pro tripod with the Tamron 70-200mm lense on it and having this telephoto lense made the fireworks fill the frame of the image. Usually I would use a remote release for this but I forgot both of them in the truck. I took a few test shots and checked my autofocus and than shut it off along with the VR on the camera. The camera was in manual mode with a shutter speed of bulb and aperture was either f8 or f9. Shutter speeds ranged from 5 to 11 seconds. ISO of 640. With not much wind that evening, the smoke hung around longer than I like while the fireworks were shot off. A boat drifted in towards the end of the fireworks show and was right at the bottom of my images which turned into a neat photograph.
To edit the images in Lightroom, I used the same preset I used last year that I created for the D7200 and firework images with a few minor adjustments such has deleting the graduated and radial filter I had on the preset. The filters adjustments didn’t match up to these images. I than added a different graduated filter to increase the exposure of the water and boats while sliding down the highlight slider to keep the color from the fireworks on the water. Saturation and vibrance sliders were adjusted as well.
Once in Photoshop, I got rid of unwanted objects like the cell phone tower on the left side of the images using the healing brush. To straighten the images, I needed an adjustment of 1.7 degrees which created white space around the image. This allowed me to use the content aware fill tool which has changed on the latest update in Photoshop. It allows you to select the area that you want “filled” and then a new layer is created that closely matches the surrounding area. It worked pretty well and than I finished the image by cropping them.
Up next will be the album taken with the Nikon D750.
