Saturday, January 02, 2010

Photography practice: Fireworks

Noodle and the gang had fireworks out when we arrived to celebrate New Year's Eve with them so I broke out the camera. Perhaps it's just that I need another lens, I don't know, but what I find happens a lot when shooting at night is that I have to open up the aperture as wide as it will go - in this case, the 50mm is at f/1.4 - to allow as much light in as possible. But at f/1.4 the depth of field is very shallow so it's hard to get an entire shot in focus. And at night it's even harder to see if what I think I have in focus is actually in focus. So, what I've found helps a lot is adjusting the sharpness afterward when editing. Here's an example:

Shutter 1/60 Aperture f/1.4 ISO 800, without sharpness adjustment

With sharpness adjustment

To check out the rest of the photos from New Year's Eve, click here.

1 comment:

Amber said...

Maybe my eyes are bad, but I think even without the sharpening, the first pic looks great!