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On Monday my Dad had the day off and so the whole family (plus a few extras) took a drive down to Point Loma to enjoy the ocean and take in the sights. In order to get out of having to hike around, I decided to bring the 5D Mark II and my T1i, along with three lenses. I had not used anything telephoto in a long time, so I was excited to try taking pictures of the city from really far away.

I took pictures of the ocean, the city, plants, rocks, and my family. The best photos fall under that last category.

I took over 450 pictures in two hours. Not counting dozens of duplicates, there were about ten pictures that made is past the first round of eliminations. I narrowed that down my favorite four, all captured by the 5D, and edited those. None are spectacular or amazing, but I like them nonetheless. It was overcast and so that sort of set the tone for the shoot. That’s just my light painting curse acting up during the day.

Here are those four. I know that the colors in the first two are slightly off but I was going for two different effects (dramatic and postcard) and so colored each photo differently in Camera Raw.

Well, I wish I had better news. My second try at fireworks photography did not go as well as my first, even though I lugged two 5D Mark II’s, a Rebel T1i, six lenses, and three tripods for what felt like ten miles up, down, and around the USS Midway for six hours on the 4th of July.

I was completely prepared and knew exactly what I needed to do to capture great pictures, but three things got in my way: clouds, smoke, and people. Fog started coming in as soon as it got dark and so the fireworks were exploding inside a bank of haze that was impossible for the camera to penetrate. I tried things like increasing the f-stop to 22 so as to capture as little surrounding light as possible, but to little avail. Second, there must have been five hundred fireworks going off every minute from nine different locations around the bay, so the fog was compounded by an impregnable layer of smoke that never blew away. Third, I had a great location to shoot the fireworks but at the last minute decided to move because I was standing in people’s way, and that proved disastrous. Most of my pictures have a line of heads along the bottom that obstruct the lower reaches of the fireworks. Oh well.

I took over 400 pictures in six hours, and less that 20 are worth editing. Like last time, here are the first four.

Most of the time the smoke was a nuisance, but sometimes it added to the composition.

Those fireworks with exploding bulbs make for interesting pictures.

Brief moments of clarity and a lot of Photoshopping produced some smokeless images. Notice the Coronado Bridge at the bottom of the next two pictures.

If you have been following the Mac Lab Blog and the happenings of the 2010 Mac Lab Summer Academy™, then you know that I am determined to capture some amazing pictures of fireworks this 4th of July. Today, the 3rd, I went to the top of the hill in Cottonwood and watched a fireworks show over the Cottonwood Golf Course. My goal was to test the new advanced shutter button and experiment with the techniques I had learned here and here.

Well, I had moderate success. The button worked well once I figured it out but I ended up not using many of its cool features. As for what I had read, well only about half actually proved to be applicable to this particular shoot. Focusing turned out to be more that just throwing the dial to infinity and the 4 seconds and f/11 trick that Scott Kelby suggested didn’t work very well. What did work phenomenally though was the baseball hat trick I read here. Yes, you are going to have to read the article to find out what I mean. The most important thing I learned, however, is that experimentation is key. There is not a single group of settings that will yield perfect pictures every time and so you must be willing to experiment and find what is best. That goes for everything in general.

I took 92 pictures in a twenty minute time period. About 25 are good. About 20 are great. Here are the first 4. What’s really good is that there is very little post-production work to be done with pictures like this. It took be under ten minutes to edit these 4 and most of that time was spent in Camera Raw.

More info here.