David's Images of the Day Photoblog
To save on costs the township does the fireworks before or after the 4th. This year weather permitting it will be on the 30th. I hope to find a good place to set up my camera.
Montgomery Township in New Jersey typically has an Independence Day fireworks celebration several days before the 4th of July. This year it was almost a week earlier. I have a great location near my house that has a view that is above the high school where the fireworks are launched. This was the first time I was able to use the new high-resolution Nikon D800 to photograph a fireworks display. In all I had five cameras set up to record the event. Individual images can be viewed here.
Montgomery Township in New Jersey typically has their Independence Day Fireworks celebration a few days before the 4th of July. This year it will be tonight. I have a great location to view the fireworks just down the road from my house. It is on a hill that looks down on the high school where the main event occurs.
Winston Hall has published an online guide for Photographing Fireworks with a DSLR camera.
I set up one camera set to do time-lapsed images (D3x with 180 mm f/2.8 lens), and a second camera do DSLR Video (D3x with 85 mm f/1.4 lens). The following 12 images were from the D3x and 180 mm lens. I haven’t used the 180 mm f/2.8 prime lens for some time and forgot how sharp this lens can be.
I finally had a chance to process the DSLR video of the 30-June-2011 Montgomery Township Fireworks display. The Nikon D3s camera is limited to 5 minute HD (720P) video segments. I ended up with three 5 minute segments. I left the in-camera sound recording on to get the sound effects of the fireworks. I also got commentary about the fireworks from a family sitting in front of my tripod. At one point you can hear a train whistle. The other clicking sound is the shutter of my other cameras. I used Adobe Premiere Pro to combine the first and third segments, zoomed in a bit so the firework display takes up more of the image, and increased the volume. I also used Premiere Pro to add a title page to the video.