Lindfield Fireworks 2018

Having had some success with fireworks photos at the Wivelsfield Bonfire Society event mid October I took advantage of the good weather and went with Alex to Lindfield for their annual firework display on 5th November.

Not coming from too far away and realising how busy the event would be we did park suitably close to the main event whilst being sufficiently far away that getting away would be no problem (top tip, turn your car in your escape direction before parking up, we saw plenty of people trying to turn around in the heavy traffic after getting very little sympathy).

I think for really good positioning a recky in daylight hours would be in order but I was still in experimental mode so not too concerned.

The plan for the evening was to test different F-stops to see at what point the fireworks looks their best.

everyone was in good spirits and the evening's events started with a torch lit parade leading a massive guy to the bonfire and a youth marching band playing followed by the fireworks.

My favourite of the evening because of the range of colours present is :

Olympus E-M10 mkii, 14mm, iso200, f10, .5s

I took around 100 shots in total and the display was long enough to ensure plenty of changes to settings, although unlike the Wivelsfield fireworks, which were set to music with a movies theme this year, Lindfield felt very much like "we've got a pile of fireworks and we're going to make some noise" kind of organisation. I'm not saying that is a bad thing, fireworks are always great to watch and there were plenty.

My final conclusion is that around F8 - F10 and 1/3rd to 1/2 a second exposure time is about right. Higher F-stops do work and whilst there is scope for more capturing more fireworks there is a danger of losing that punch that fireworks deliver by being so bright and whilst tweaking in Lightroom assists, nothing replaces a good initial shot and there is an element of pot luck as to which colour fireworks happen to fire off, so this picture just doesn't cut it :

Olympus E-M10 mk11, 14mm, iso200, f10, .5s

But that isn't universal truth as this shot at F16 demonstrates :

Olympus E-M10 mk II, 14mm, iso200, F16, .5s

The complete set of pictures can be seen here.

Wivelsfield Big Bang, part 2

As a second post about the Wivelsfield Bonfire Society fireworks, Wivelsfield Big Bang at the school on the 19th October, 2018, I will include the fireworks pictures themselves.

I feel these photos "come out well" and certainly display on screen with some impact. 

The picture above is my personal favourite, the bursts of light almost look like dandelions on a sunny day.

There was a small amount of processing, a couple of pictures were cropped, having set the camera up and made minor adjustments at the beginning to try to frame the shots correctly I had to go with what I had set and hope; best will in the world the rear LCD, located somewhere near my knees, is only an indication at best and fireworks do their thing at various heights. You will the top of a small tree in a lot of shots, I had no idea that was there until loading up on the PC.

With regards positioning, I need a better position but whilst I was attending and taking photos I was also dressed in a hi-viz jacket (and I can tell you batman looked cooler in a hi-viz that I did, not something you see everyday) and manning the boundary to ensure no one strayed close to the fireworks.

With regards processing the changes I made were solely about making the pictures stand out.

I changed the colour temperature, not 100% consistently but most started at around 3000k on auto, I saw an online suggestion of using Daylight (5500k) but I found that over the top for the strength of colour (let's call the predominant theme tango orange) and generally was using 4000-5000 (my skills are truly amateur here, so I mean it was 4000 or 4500 or 5000).

 

I did have to tweak the tint a couple of times, it seems fireworks are predominantly orange so orange and red fireworks together become too dominant so I have tried to bring back a better range of colour, for some reason my pictures tended to be around +7 towards the pink end of the scale (I need to experiment with the camera, I am not sure whether that is a feature of my raw files or Lightroom).

Blacks were increased to make the sky blacker, the background actually looks across Burgess Hill to the West which the usual orange glow of street lamps so making the sky a little blacker makes the fireworks stand out better.

Highlights were reduced a little, recovering all of the pixels tends to make for a flat picture so some burn out of pixels, the centre of the firework explosion, seems acceptable to me but a reduction outside of that brings colours away from just white.

Clarity was increased, generally around +40 to really make the streams of sparks stand out.

I increased vibrance to somewhere around +3- which brings the colours out.

And a small increase, around +10, for Saturation gives strong colours, online advice was suggesting +20 but that just went straight to hurting my eyes.

The final alteration was sharpening, some of the pictures, indeed the majority are untouched but with such a lot of movement some needed a little sharpening to add some punch.

A couple I did also adjust the luminance setting for Noise reduction, around +10, just to reduce the noise I was seeing. Interestingly inspite of using the same settings throughout once the show was underway the amount of sharpening and consequent luminance adjustment varied but in practical terms I am not sure that shows on the final output one way or another; so that is something else I need to work on, improving my appreciation of what the final picture will look like at each stage of change.

The bonfire society will be back next year, to keep up to date visit their Facebook page.

Wivelsfield Big Bang

We attended the Wivelsfield Bonfire Society fireworks, Wivelsfield Big Bang at the school last Friday for the movie themed event.

Tickets were sold out and circa 900 people in attendance with a good vibe as mostly locals and a strong support for / from nursery and primary aged children as an ideal fireworks evening for them (safe, easy to park, no long walks or muddy paths and lots of light up things to buy and run around the playground with).

This was a good opportunity to take some photos using the Olympus E-M10 Mk11. Kitted out with plenty of batteries and memory cards and the 14-42 mm pancake lens as my widest angle lens I fired up Live Comp mode, dialled in half a second, iso 200 and F5.6, plugged in my trusty ebay cable release, found a spot for my tripod and went to town.

For this post I will include the pictures of kids running around (it was dark, I assume they were kids, there might have been adults too) with led lights.

At the start there was a pleasant sunset for the background.

But it didn't take long for darkness to full descend.

Not that dark put any dampner on the running around going on, everyone was in high spirits.

Hope you enjoy the pictures, if you want to know more please post a comment.

Wivelsfield Fireworks

Wivelsfield Big Bang Fireworks display.

First attempt at a long video, the camera does struggle with auto-focus (no idea how to turn off on video, clearly necessary) and the volume but better than nothing :
Wivelsfield Big Bang 2017