In years past in the little cul de sac just outside the Nerdery, we would often be treated to a right professional display of pyrotechnics from my dear Puerto Rican neighbours next door.
They’ve since moved up the hill near the Wizarding World of Wendell and this year was the first opportunity to introduce their new neighbours to the shock and awe campaigns we’d gotten used to over the years.
I think you’ll agree…we were not at all disappointed!
It was a lovely way to spend the Independence Day holiday in between the occasional forays into accountancy, the Internal Revenue Code, and general mischief with a bit of time for making some art.
The technique was dead simple…mount the D810 on a tripod with the Nikkor 16-35mm f/4 ultrawide lens and set the lowest possible ISO (ISO 40) and smallest aperture the camera lens supports which is f/22. The lens was set to manual focus set at infinity.
If this sounds somewhat familiar, this is a very similar technique to photographing lightning.
The trick is the manual trigger which allows you to set the D810’s shutter speed to BULB mode which means that when you depress the button on the trigger, the shutter opens and stays open until you release the trigger button when you’ve felt you’ve captured enough of the fireworks.
With the shutter open, the fireworks paint multiple paths across the sensor to get the desired effect.
All the photos you see here are straight from the RAW files out of the camera with no retouching or any other fiddling in Lightroom.
So happy Independence Day and up the Colonies and down with the British and all that and enjoy some lovely fireworks! 🙂
