Fireworks with the Pen

Labor Day weekend in Cincinnati means one thing... the annual fireworks show on the Ohio River.  This is one of the bigger pyrotechnic displays in the country where two barges and two bridges are stuffed full of things that glow, sparkle and go boom in the night sky.  The display runs for well over 30 minutes and is expertly choreographed to music by a local FM radio station.

This year my family was invited to a fireworks party held at a house about four miles upriver from the show with a great backyard view of all the goings on.  Armed only with my Olympus Pen, the 14-42mm lens and a small Slik carbon fiber tripod with a Manfroto ball head I decided to see what kind of shots I could pull in.  I brought the small Pen instead of my Canon DSLR as I knew there would be a lot of people at the party, space would be tight and I didn't want to be obnoxious and rude trying to shoot with a full system with so many people around.

The Pen has a wide variety of automatic modes, most of which I never touch as I almost always shoot in aperture priority.  In this case though I decided to use the dedicated "fireworks" mode which set the camera might as I would - wide open at f/5.6 (at 42mm), 4 second exposure and -1 exposure compensation.  All images were recorded in RAW so I didn't have to full with the white balance.  (This was one advantage I've found with the Pen over my old Canon G10.  If you used any of the preset modes on that camera it would always shoot jpegs.  For some reason Canon decided if you need to use the preset modes you must not be serious enough to want the exposures recorded in RAW.)

Being so far away from the action and with very little reach from the lens (only 84mm in 35mm terms) each image captured lots and lots of extra space.  But I was really pleased when I pulled all the shots into Lightroom and cropped down to just the fireworks part of the image.  The resolution was still outstanding!  Each of these shots probably has 60-75% of the extra black space cropped out.  In addition to cropping each image had the blacks pumped up a bit, the clarity turned up as well as the vibrance.  The result are shots that look very close to what we saw in the night sky.  A good night of shooting.

Enjoy!
Tom Laux
September 8, 2009