I just love taking photos of fireworks. And I just got back home from ones at the Kuchajda lake. It really is a great spot for them, as the lake is very calm, creating great reflection. Also they usually have the fireworks right at the start of the blue hour, so there is also some sky (not like the midnight ones at new years :))

I got some nice photos, so don’t be surprised if you see more of them the next week. I just forgot to change the composition in the middle of the shooting, so all photos have the same one. I just liked the fireworks so much, that I forgot to focus more on the camera.

This photo is a single exposure, edited in Oloneo Photoengine and finished in Photoshop. Looks a little more busier that I usually like my fireworks shots to be, but that a result of the longer exposure I used.

For today I experimented even more with my photos. So just in Photoshop, I created this crazy image, with varying times. You can see here a single frame first, as the whole animated gif is over 4Mb big, and it can take a moment to load completely.

This animation is created from 9 images, all spliced together into 16 frames for this. Took a little while, so I will have to find a little faster process, if I ever do another one :) I hope you like it.

As every photographer, I love to play with new gear. So when I found out that a friend of mine had a tilt-shift lens, I immediately had to borrow it to take a few shots :) It’s really interesting how you can affect whats in focus and whats not with a lens like that. But as it was a 90mm lens, I had to go somewhere high up and far away to get the effect I wanted. So where else to go as to my favorite spot in Bratislava, the top of the SNP bridge. And as you can see, the result is quite interesting :)

This is a manual blend from three exposures, created in Photoshop.

Let’s look at another photo, and how I put it together. For today’s photo I used 56 different exposures, that were all combined in a different way. This was my first experiment with shooting star trails in the middle of the city, and I was quite happy with the result. So let’s go :)

For this result

I started with 48 exposures for the stars.

Each one looking like this (you can’t really see the stars, but that’s normal :))

I edited them all in Lightroom, to remove lens distortion, chromatic aberrations and vignetting. I then exported all into layers in photos. The exported images all looked like this one:

I can’t show you the Photoshop file for the stars, as I forgot to save it, but what I did was to change all except the first layer to the blend mode lighten. I also played with contrast and levels, to make the stars more visible. In the end I ended with this result.

With this the first part of the photo was finished, not for the bridge part. I took additional 8 images as a HDR series.

I applied the same corrections to them in Lightroom as with the star shots, to make the blend easier. I then exported them all as 16-bit Tiff files and loaded into Oloneo Photoengine. There I changed the strength and contrast to get this result:

From here I continued into Photoshop. I loaded the HDR and the stars images into layers, and blended them together by using a selection of the sky and manually painting few areas. I then also applied Color effex detail extractor onto the image, to get more detail on the bridge and make the stars even more visible. I ended by applying more contrast and making the stars more whiter by using levels.

And that’s all I did with this image. To find out more on how I edit, check out the guides and before after categories on this blog, or check out my video tutorial series here:

So I got home, but after a hot day of running around with my camera in a very strong sunlight, I feel that will fall into bed very early. So no editing for me, and one more day of some of my favorite photos for you.

Today they are form Bratislava, and you can see my Top photo spots in Bratislava here.