Tag: fireworks

Thunder Over Louisville 2018

Yankee Doodle's Dream
Yankee Doodle’s Dream

Thunder Over Louisville, is the annual kickoff event of the Kentucky Derby Festival. The event is an airshow and fireworks display in Louisville, Kentucky. It is held each April, two weeks before the first Saturday in May, which is the day the Kentucky Derby takes place.

The fireworks display is the largest annual fireworks display in North America and started in its current location along the Ohio River in 1991 with fireworks, and the annual air show was added in 1992.

The fireworks show starts at 9:30 PM, along with a synchronized soundtrack through PA and radio. An average of 625,000 people have attended each year since 1997, lining the banks of the river in Louisville, and across the river in Jeffersonville and Clarksville, Indiana.

Just before sunset eight 400-foot barges are towed into place on both the east and west sides of the Clark Memorial Bridge launch the fireworks, provided by Zambelli Fireworks Internationale, more fireworks are sent up from the bridge, as well as spectacular streams of fireworks cascading from the bridge deck, that symbolize Louisville’s location at the Falls of the Ohio River. The display goes on for nearly 30 minutes before culminating with a grand finale that creates the sounds of rolling thumder for several minutes.

I have been attending and photographing the Thunder Over Louisville fireworks show, since it began in 1991, from the Louisville waterfront. In 2018 I went across the river from Louisville and shot from a location beneath the John F. Kennedy Bridge and Abraham Lincoln Bridge on the riverbank in Jeffersonville, Indiana. I chose this spot because it allowed me to frame the scene with the Kennedy bridge overhead, the Louisville waterfront in the background and the silhouettes of the people in the foreground on the Jeffersonville, Indiana river bank.

I shot this year using a Nikon D7000 on a tripod using a cable release with the camera set to Aperture Priority and the bulb setting. Instead of determining a shiutter speed in advance I used a trial and error approach that included me counting down the seconds that I held the shutter open. I set the ISO to 100 and varied the aperture from f14 to f4; ultimately I settled on f6.3 which allowed me to use around 1.5 to 3 second exposures though a few times I used 15 to 30 seconds. When I saw, after a few test frames, that everything from five to fifteen seconds captured my vision for the scene; I simply adjusted the length of time based on my feeling for the amount of light that the moment called for. Though not very scientific but I found this method worked exceptionally well and allowed me to capture many more usable images than I had over the years of photographing fireworks.

 

It’s Independence Day!

Click on any image to enlarge it in another window.

BOOM!
BOOM!

Today is Independence Day here in the USA. Rather than go out to a fireworks show tonight I decided to share these shots from last year’s fireworks in Waterfront Park in Louisville.

Cosmic Dust
Cosmic Dust
Green Hornet
Green Hornet
Pink and Green Nucleus
Pink and Green Nucleus
Flaming Flower
Flaming Flower
A Star is Born.
A Star is Born.
The Crowd Goes OOH LA LA
The Crowd Goes OOH LA LA
Technicolor Dreamboat
Technicolor Dreamboat

Focus on Fireworks

Green Hornet
Green Hornet meets the Pink Panther

Click on any image to enlarge it in another window.

This year for the Fourth of July fireworks I tried a new technique that I read about in several various posts around the web. The basic premise is to use focus to create blur around a fireworks explosion. I set my focus at just short of infinity and then refocused after tripping the shutter. I used shutter speeds of 1 and 2 seconds at f5.6 and f8 to experiment with this technique.

Rhapsody in Blue and Green
Rhapsody in Blue and Green

Click on any image to enlarge it in another window.

Technicolor Dreamboat
Technicolor Dreamboat

Click on any image to enlarge it in another window.

Pink and Green Nucleus
Pink and Green Nucleus

Click on any image to enlarge it in another window.

Flaming Flower
Flaming Flower

Click on any image to enlarge it in another window.

A Star is Born.
A Star is Born.

Click on any image to enlarge it in another window.

Cosmic Dust
Cosmic Dust

Click on any image to enlarge it in another window.

BOOM!
BOOM!

Click on any image to enlarge it in another window.

I finished all the images in Aperture 3 and really cranked up the sharpening both in the RAW file and in the finished image. I also played around a lot with the Saturation, Luminance and Range sliders in the individual color channels to intensify the colors.

All in all I am better satisfied with these fireworks images than any I have attempted in the past. I think I’ll work on refining the technique the next time a fireworks opportunity presents itself.

Funnel Cake Fourth

Fourth of July Funnel Cakes
Funnel Cake Fourth

Click on the image to enlarge it in another window.

This past week I attended the Fourth of July event in Louisville’s Waterfront Park to capture some fireworks images. While waiting for the fireworks show to begin I wandered around the park looking for images that spoke to the idea of festivals and the attendant support services that are needed whenever large groups of people gather for a celebration. The sky was leaden with the remnants of our unrelenting week of rain and thunderstorms so I went in search of some color to shoot.

As I strolled through the park I came upon the food vendors area and was immediately drawn to the scene you see here. I liked the graphic quality of the signage and the lights on and in the funnel cake vendor and decided to create a composition that incorporated it. I found a place behind the food wagons that also held some promise of a strong foreground element. I set my tripod up and shot this image because I enjoyed the strong diagonal lines and the contrast of colors between the booths and the park’s water feature. I also liked the way the stainless steel rails contrasted with the concrete and the angles that they created.

I shot a three frame bracket set using +2, 0 and -2 EV to be sure that I had a wide dynamic range to work with. Back at my computer I first took the three RAW frames into NIK Sharpener Pro and pre-sharpened them. I then opened the three images in NIK HDR Efex Pro 2 where I merged them into a HDR image. I applied the Deep 2 preset and then adjusted the amount of tone mapping and contrast to suit my taste. After the initial tone mapping was completed I returned the HDR image to Aperture 3 where I adjusted the individual color channels to bring out the reds and yellows of the signage. I also added some additional adjustments to the contrast and sharpened the image before adding a small vignette to it.

Fourth of July Fireworks

July 4, 2011

Today is the Fourth of July, here in the USA we celebrate our birth as a nation on this day and one of our traditions is to shoot off fireworks. I am posting a shot from last year’s  Fourth of July celebration here in Louisville at Waterfront Park as my tribute to that great tradition.

I don’t have much to say about this image or for that matter anything else today. I’m discovering how difficult choosing an image and writing about it on a daily basis truly is. I’m assessing what I’ve written over the past couple of months and looking for a common thread that will inspire me to share more images with those of you who take the time to visit my blog.

Last night I thought about how I go about choosing the processing of a given image and how I can better share my knowledge about photography with my readers. I have some ideas that I hope will be received well and will be rolling them out over the next few days. Until then I just want to thank each and every person that has viewed and/or commented on my work.

See you tomorrow…