D750 - 4th of July Fireworks on Lake Panorama
Equipment Used: Nikon D750 & Tamron 24-70mm f2.8, VanGuard Abel Plus 363CT, Lightroom & Photoshop CC
This year’s edition of Lake Panorama’s Fire in the Sky was held Saturday night at dusk so I headed down with my two cameras to see what would be lighting up the sky in 2021. I wasn’t able to get my typical spot I like so settled on another location that was “off-center” of the view down the water to the fireworks.
The D750 was set to aperture of 9.0, blub for the shutter and ISO of 640 to capture the firework bursts. Being set on the tripod, I turned off VR/Autofocus on the lense and put the lense to 55mm to get the field of view I wanted. Using a shutter trigger, I would watch the fireworks launch and then try and catch the bursts right which resulted in the shutter speed ranging from 7 to 14 seconds.
Once in Lightroom, I created a new preset for the fireworks that adjusted the exposure, shadows, saturation, clarity, vibrance, etc using graduated and radial filters to apply those adjustments to certain areas of the image. This made editing quicker and allowed me to move the radial filter around on the firework bursts too.
There wasn’t much editing in PhotoShop other than using the clone and healing brush tools to get rid of unwanted objects in the water. I did merge three different images into a single exposure using layer masks and the lighten blend mode on those layers to create a multiple firework burst image.
Once again, the firework show on Lake Panorama was great with the reflection on the water and all the boats on the water.
