Cameras allow us to see things differently, or in some cases, see things we normally could not see at all.   This can be especially true for long exposures.   In the case of fireworks, adjusting your aperture and shutter speed enables you to turn burning embers, bursting and then falling in the sky, into colorful streaks of light.   Generally speaking, your aperture affects the thickness of those streaks, while your shutter speed affects their length and number in a single image.  I used a very small aperture of f22 to create very thin streaks from multiple bursts.  Exposures ranged from 3 to 12 seconds, with longest ones having the most intense concentration of streaks in a single image.  A second technique used here is the blending of two exposures to make each image.  A 20 second exposure with no fireworks, taken at the end of the show, resulted in a well lit train station for the foreground, while shorter exposures were used to capture the fireworks overhead.  The foreground was blended with each of the fireworks images using luminosity masks or the “lighten” blend mode in Photoshop.   Each resultant image captures a unique combination of shapes, colors and patterns in their unique moment in time.   I intentionally put the images into a slideshow that mimics the constantly changing fireworks you would see in the night sky.   Only now, you can see the unseen.  Enjoy!

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