Summer Freedom

{Brush from Ali Edwards Color Challenge on Designer Digitals-July 2009}

My neighbors probably think that I’m crazy.  Well…they’ve already caught me creeping around my yard taking sneaky photos of robins, so they probably aren’t too surprised.  I was out in the very corner of my front yard with my tripod taking photos of the fireworks.  Nevermind the fact that those fireworks are nearly 10 miles away.  {PSSST…I LOVE my zoom lens.}

I have never taken photos of fireworks with my DSLR.  I found an article in an old CK magazine a few weeks ago when I was cleaning out my studio, so I pulled the article out of the magazine and placed it in my Summer binder.  So tonight when the fireworks started and I realized that I wanted to take photos…it was easy to find the article :)  And my tripod is always handy. 

Here are the settings that I used for most of the photos. I tried a couple of different things, but I kept going back to these:

AV mode, f22, ISO: auto, focus: manual 

  The biggest problems that I had were:  1) not bumping the tripod after I pressed the shutter release. 2) Setting up the tripod so that the massive zoom lens didn’t topple the tripod. 

When I loaded the photos onto my computer, I used Photoshop Elements 6.0 to crop them.  {I had trouble zooming in on the action in such a way that I didn’t have street lights in any of the photos.} 

That was it for post processing. 

And I never had to leave my front yard.  :)

Hope everyone has a fantastic day celebrating the holiday!  Happy Fourth!