Capturing Fireworks through the lens.

A Fireworks show dissipates in a matter of minutes in mere flashes. It's just memory and smoke soon afterwards.
Here are a few tips to capture it on camera.
Location Location Location!!! yes it applies to shooting fireworks as well as buying a good piece of land.
Find a location away harsh light or street lights that might strike your lens and point the camera against the dark sky (as majority of fireworks show start in the dark).Reason being,stray light on the lens will produce unwanted distraction in your final image.

A tripod is a necessary requirement for this kind of shooting as the exposure can last several seconds through possibly several bursts.

Type of camera - an SLR is ideal. But these days a compact camera will provide several seconds of exposure.
Type of lens is entirely up to you, depending on how much of the fireworks show you would like to capture. If it is an SLR, do not use auto focus, as the lens would start to hunt for focus.
Wait for the fireworks burst to start and focus on a couple of bursts and fix the camera position on the tripod. From here you are just a few easy steps away from shooting some interesting fireworks with your camera.
If you have an SLR or and advanced digital compact camera, set the exposure mode to either manual or shutter priority and in either of these modes you would set the shutter speed to bulb (keeping the lens open). It would be immensely helpful, if you would have at your disposal a good size black cloth or a big enough black card board cut so that it can completelt cover your lens.
if your camera has a cable release fix it else it is the kind triggered by a wireless remote adjust the camera so that it would respond only to your wireless remote control. This is done to eliminate any possible vibrations induced from pressing the shutter release using your fingers.

Once the above steps are taken care of click to keep the shutter open as the fireworks show is going fulls steam ahead. Capture several bursts while the lens is open, to accomplish this, Wait for the first burst to be captured, cover the lens with either the cloth or the black card board until the next burst gets ready to explode. Uncover the lens till that burst disappears. Cover the lens again and repeat the process until you are satisfied you have gotten several bursts. Its time to close the exposure by either clicking the shutter release or if it is an advance digital the max exposure would be 30 secs to a minute. Hence it will close on its own accord.

This is not an exact science. It is more of trial and error. The above is shot of fireworks was captured in stone mountain park Atlanta GA. This was the second show of the evening. I had the advantage of watching the first one to get an idea of the sequence and waited for the second one to capture it in my camera. The above shot captured several bursts using the technique described above. Experiment all you can with a digital camera you have nothing to waste and a lot to learn.

Christmas lighting in HDR

Yeah I know, its a little too late to be posting pictures related to Christmas in Jan. Still better late than never. Not too long ago I stumbled upon the whole phenomenon of HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography. It was a huge discovery for me.
If I were to explain HDR to a layman, I would say with a it comes close to resembling the nuances in shades of light that we see with our naked eyes. Where as a single photograph reproduced by a camera can see a small range of shade.
HDR Photograph is a result of digital post processing using a photo editing software such as photomatix or adobe photoshop cs2 or cs3.
In a nutshell (slightly bigger nutshell, bare with me), The process of producing a HDR image from any conventional camera involves merging a series of pictures shot in different exposures (preferably raw) or using a single raw image saved in different exposures using a photo editing program and merging them using blending modes in any software that supports an HDR merge.
Here is an article that explains how such a merge could be performed using photoshop CS2 or higher. Check out some cool HDR pictures in Trey Ratcliff's site.

To try out my first experiment with shooting a high contrast scene in HDR, I headed to La Centerra a retail shopping center in the quaint neighborhood of Cinco Ranch. Christmas decoration were pretty decent and not overly done. Since it was a cold foggy night there was hardly anybody around.

The two pictures above show the opposite end of the perspective in each. The picture with the tree in the foreground reveals all the lights including the bright light on the bow from a powerful overhead light while revealing the fog in the background. Such a contrast tends to be blown out or underexposed in any conventional photograph.
I shot a total of 5 exposures of each scene above at exposures 0ev +1ev +2ev -1ev -2ev. Merged them in Photoshop CS2 as explained in luminous light website.