Today’s shot is once again a collaboration shot with my wife Erika. She had several shots from this showing of Wishes I wanted to edit and so now I’ve come back and edited a second one. You can follow her on Instagram @emcooperphoto.
Shooting & Editing All Their Wishes Part 2
Erika shot this with the Nikon D800 and Nikon 24-70 2.8. She used a 3 stop B&W ND Filter. I’m a big fan of the 3 stop ND for shooting fireworks as it seems just right for shooting long fireworks exposures but not too long where all the fireworks get jumbled together in a mess. For this shot I double processed the image. The castle and the fireworks are one processing of the image and the people and Partners statue are another. The main difference is that for the people and Mickey I bumped the clarity to around +50. Typically I do not adjust clarity at all but in instances like this where I am trying to make the lit edges stand out and there are lots of shadow it works very well. Otherwise I’m in the camp that adding clarity to an image is a bad idea as it usually makes the photo look terrible.