In the past few months, I’ve graduated to a DSLR, a Canon 7D. Since then, I’ve been amazed at how much time one could put into understanding how to make good use of such a high-quality camera. The path I’ve been taking is to simply try one thing at a time. Tonight, it was a good time to learn how to shoot fireworks. I would have liked to have shot from several vantage points, but it would have been difficult to move around once it got dark in the thick crowd at the St. Louis riverfront. There are many people with ideas out there on how to set one’s camera. I started out at f11, 100 ISO and bulb shutter, making use of a remote shutter cable. I eventually moved to f8, in order to brighten up the arch and buildings better. I made a mistake by failing to set focus to manual focus, which caused the camera to struggle and delay on many shots, because it had a difficult time focusing on the darkness, which was when I often tried to open the shutter–I didn’t realize that mistake until after the fireworks show.

It’s great fun trying to anticipate the best way to compose these shots. Post-shooting production was rather minimal. Mostly I used Lightroom 4 to nudge down the highlights and the darks, plus add a bit of clarity. There are no filters on any of these 4 shots, though, even though they look a bit surreal.  Click on the images for a higher res view.