New Year Fireworks

tony
January 1, 2017
New Zealand / news / tips

Happy New Year and everything you wish for a great 2017!

New Year Fireworks are often the first photographic subject of the New Year and 2017 is no different. It is easy enough to grab a midrange zoom, set the camera to ISO 200-400, f4-5.6 and 1/10s and shoot the colourful bursts but then every year starts to look the same. The challenge is to try and capture the show in context and treat it more as a landscape with fireworks which is difficult as there is little ambient light to show the landscape. In Rotorua we have a New Year Fireworks display that has an early session at 9:30pm for the young kids that won’t stay awake until midnight. If the day is relatively clear there is still some light in the sky which can work well, giving a deep blue background to the warm colours of the fireworks. This session I shot from a tripod so that I could blend layers if needed to show multiple burst in a single frame. This is easily done by open separate files as layers in Photoshop and then changing the blend mode to “lighten”. A layer mask can then be used to fine tune what is visible in the composition if needed. As it turned out the pyrotechnics were quite dense and the single frame here shows more burst than the layered file of the next image.

Single frame from the early show. Looking across the southern end of Lake Rotorua with Mt. Ngongotaha in the background.

Fireworks against the last of the blue sky. Composite of 2 frames with the blending mode of the layers changed to lighten.

The midnight show is in total dark so it is useful to try and get a foreground that can introduce a bit of interest to the image. We are lucky to have the lake to use as an element and with the right conditions and a good spot the reflections can work well. This year I managed to find a small tree stump near the edge that worked as an element in some of the compositions. This session I shot handheld to give more mobility to react to the bursts and try and position the stump in the reflection in the water. With the black background it is still possible to layer and mask multiple handheld images even if the static elements aren’t in perfect register.

Image from 3 shot layered stack with layer masking

All images shot with Nikon D810 and Nikon 24-120mm f4VR lens.

Processed through Lightroom CC and Photoshop CC2017 and Macphun Luminar. I have been using Macphun plugins for some time and their Tonality plugin is now my preferred Black and White conversion plugin due to the ability to use different conversions on layers with masks within the plugin. Luminar is a recent release and I am enjoying exploring the options it offers. It is extensively customisable and also incorporates layers and masks which add a lot of flexibility.

JPG files exported using JPEGmini Pro Photoshop extension. I have been using the free version of this program for a long time to compress down images for web use and at times for web order/delivery of high res files. B&H had a recent special on the full version so I went for that and find the Lightroom plugin and Photoshop extension really useful.