Fireworks 1st try

[macobee]

More on my site in my signature http://web.mac.com/hongkongculinarian/Site/Welcome.html
this was my first time doing fireworks! i am quite pleased, not pro material but not bad for a first time.........but didnt get to it at all to put the black card for the lens as there is so much fireworks here, there is just no dark in between!

[tdodd]

The first one suffers from too much smoke in the sky, causing distraction for the eyes. I prefer the composition in the second one. Maybe you could tone the blacks down a bit and pep up the colours in the fireworks. If you had the tools to "burn" parts of the image you could further disguise some of the smokey haze.

Here's a 30 second edit showing a 50/50 split of before/after edited in Lightroom. I darkened the blacks/shadows but don't have the facility to selective burn in individual bits of sky.
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[Robert_Lay]

tdodd nailed it - your shots all had fogged (or veiled) blacks.

[macobee]

hm, thanks guys, but ....i think my shots showed what was there, and did anyone ever see any firework without smoke? to me that would be just unnatural. also i think anywhere in HK city centre it will be hard to get blacks true black with all the light pollution going on. anyhow maybe these 2 were not the best so pls do have a ook on my website and see if theres any ones you like more.

I will have to learn more editing skills now....to clean up my pics i guess

Thanks

Marco

[macobee]

few more, maybe these are better?

[macobee]

2 more

[tdodd]

hm, thanks guys, but ....i think my shots showed what was there, and did anyone ever see any firework without smoke? to me that would be just unnatural.
It is unnatural to have 3 seconds of action frozen before your eyes into a single frame. Eyes do not have a 3 second exposure setting. The fireworks would flash far more brightly in real life, compared to the background illumination. Let's say your shutter speed was 1/25 instead of 3 seconds. I pick 1/25 as an example because it is about the same exposure time as one frame of film or one full frame of PAL video. The trails of the fireworks would have been correctly exposed - they would have been very short, and quite uninteresting - but bright enough without blowing out. At 1/25 the illumination of the smoke would have been negligible, relative to the brightness of the fireworks themselves.

I'm sure you would expect to see smoke, but fireworks are a visual spectacle. They are art. I would prefer to show them at their best, rather than, as you put it, "natural". The smoke is a by-product of creating the light (and sound). Sometimes it can enhance the effect, but mostly it is an unavoidable evil. Keep it in your photos if you wish. I'd rather my firework photos looked punchy and exciting.

By the way, normally a firework display has quite an audible commotion going on as well. Yet all I I got from your photos was a stoney silence. Doesn't seem very "natural" to me.

Just a point of view...... :)

[macobee]

thanks Tdodd your explanation makes a lot of sense to me now, i can understand better now and seeing it like that you are perfectly right. its jotted down in my camera notes book for use next time.

thansk a lot ;)

Marco