Trinity Fireworks: Before and After

Undeveloped fireworks image

This was a lucky surprise.  I was in Newfoundland at the end of August and ended up in Trinity on the Bonavista Peninsula when they were holding the Trinity Days Festival.  Trinity is a wonderful small village on the Atlantic coast that was settled in the 16th century.  It is home to fewer than 200 people and the homes are wonderful examples of Georgian architecture.  The night I was there they were holding a small firework display down on the beach.  Not really knowing how good it would be, I headed to the beached armed with my D300 and a selection of short lenses.  I wasn’t sure at this time if they would launch from a boat on the bay or on the beach, but I positioned myself as far in front as I could and set up my camera on the tripod with the 12-24 f4 lens and the cable release.  I have shot fireworks before and I usually like 4-6 sec exposures to get the trailing firework effect.  I set the ISo at 200.  Once the fireworks started I realised that they were pretty much straight up over my head, so I quickly repositioned my camera and set the lens at 12mm to get a wide portion of the sky.  Every time a rocket went up, I shot.  Sometimes I waited until the burst began, other times I shot as soon as I heard the whistle of the rocket rising.  I varied the shutter speed a little.

As a fireworks display progresses, it gets fairly smokey and I usually find that my best images are those from early on in the display.  This is certainly true of this image.  The perfect positioning is simply a example of what all photographers must do to get the perfect shot–keep shooting because you never really know what you will get until you look over the images later.  Get the technical aspects right and then focus on composition and giving yourself the best chance of a great image–this one was definitely due to the wide angle setting.  I knew I could crop later if I got too much black space, but this image needed very little work and no cropping.

As shot, the the white balance color temperature is at 3100K.  All I did in the developed version was up the recovery tab to 24 to deal with some of the brightest spots in the firework burst, and then increased clarity (+55), vibrance (+24) and saturation (+15) to give the colour a bit more presence.  That was it.  This is one of my favourite images from my entire Newfoundland trip and one of my best firework shots ever–proof that small-town festivals can be great sources for images!

Developed fireworks image

While playing around with the fireworks images, I decided to see how some of the Lightroom presets would work.  One effect that I really liked was the COL Negative Point Curve.  This gave a perfect negative image of the firework burst on a plain white background.  So, even after developing the image the way you want, take it a little further and see what you can create.  Lightroom’s ability to create Virtual Copies is a great way to try different effects without creating lots of duplicate files–and they take up no harddrive space.

Negative firework effect

Let me know what you think in the comments section below.