Another Fireworks

JSPhotography

This is what my lake looks like on the 4th. What do you think? I waited a year to get this shot. To get around the docks and boat lifts I ended up jumping in the water.

JSPhotography

Allright, pushed down to the bottom of the page with no comments. What's wrong with it? What can I do to it? Gimmy some feedback people.

karlabbott

I'd prefer to see more detail in the lake. Not having ever shot fireworks before though, I'm curious if a longer exposure would ruin the effect of the fireworks. If it would, then you'd have to bump the ISO even higher or open the aperture up more or maybe even both..

I like the overall composition and your efforts to capture the whole lake. That said, I'd be interested in some isolation shots too where a good telephoto lens would really compress the reflection and we could focus on one or two bursts. What would be even more awesome (and less out of your control) is if the whole lake from left to right had fireworks going off.

schmoo

It's a tough decision to capture the whole scene and get several sets of fireworks going off, or somehow being able to focus on one. It's a cool idea to see so many sets at once, but there's little compositionally that grabs the eye because of the tradeoff on detail. But I def think the concept is awesome.

JSPhotography

Thanks for the feedback. I do have lots of individual shots also. Given the long weekend I had a lot of opportunity to play and practice. This was just a shot/concept that I wanted to capture along with other stuff. I was trying to convey the feeling of having them going off from multiple locations around the lake. Allthough there were possibly 8 - 10 different locations shooting this is the most I got in the air at the same time. I suppose if my PS skills were better I could merge some stuff but that feels like cheating to me.

Cuong

For individual close up shots, the bursting firework is the main subject. On a wide shot, you'll need more than a few bursts to grab the viewer's attention. Don't think of merging multiple images into one as cheating but rather creating a really long exposure. Next time try multiple shots with the same settings (tripod mounted) and you can easily merge all the layers using the Lighter Color blend mode, like what I did with this one.

Cuong

JSPhotography

I'll look into it that blend mode. I have more shots to work with.