Z6II - 4th of July Fireworks on Lake Panorama
Equipment Used: Nikon Z6II, 24-70mm f4, Slik Pro Tripod, 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.
This was the first time using the Z6II on fireworks so I didn’t know what to expect so kept the settings similar to the D750 with ISO of 500 and aperture of f8.0. I had the shutter speed in bulb and ranged holding down the shutter button from 6 to 20 seconds. Since the Z6II has in body stabilization, I turned that off and turned the autofocus on the lense off as well. A benefit of the Z6II over the D750 was how it showed the fireworks exploding on the LCD which allowed me to frame a new compensation quicker.
Since the Lightroom edition I have doesn’t support Z6II raw files I had to download Nikons new software program and turn them into TIF’s and then edit in Lightroom. I created another 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. These adjustments were different than what I had created using the D750.
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.
I was pleased with how the Z6II performed on the fireworks and look forward to the next fireworks show I’ll be capturing. Hoping I can improve on a few items that I noticed while editing the images.
