Lincoln Memorial

Monday, July 25, 2011
Lincoln Memorial by dustinmccollum
Lincoln Memorial, a photo by dustinmccollum on Flickr.

Reprocessing old photos again. This was from our trip to DC a couple of summers ago before Rachel was born. DC is a great place to visit, just be prepared to walk, a lot.

Church HDR

Thursday, July 21, 2011
Church HDR by dustinmccollum
Church HDR, a photo by dustinmccollum on Flickr.

I've been messing around with HDR a little lately. I love what it does to the clouds.

In case you don't know what HDR is, it stands for High Dynamic Range. Basically it's combining 3 different exposures (one normal exposure, one over-exposed, and one under-exposed) of the same image into one image.

Cliff Hanger

Saturday, July 9, 2011
Salem Fair by dustinmccollum
Salem Fair, a photo by dustinmccollum on Flickr.

Another ride at the Salem Fair.

Salem Fair

Friday, July 8, 2011
Salem Fair by dustinmccollum
Salem Fair, a photo by dustinmccollum on Flickr.

How I Shoot Fireworks

Sunday, July 3, 2011

With the Fourth of July being tomorrow, I though I would share how I photograph fireworks. It's relatively easy as long as you have a few essentials.

First, you obviously need a camera, but you also need to be able to access the manual settings on the camera itself. Some point and shoot cameras will let you do this as well.

Secondly, you need a tripod since you will be probably be shooting for at least 4 or 5 seconds.

Whatever lens(es) you have will work. But if you have more than one, you have some options as far as what you want them to look like. I shot the photo below with a telephoto lens. All you get is the firework itself, nothing else.


In this photo, I used a wide lens and got a silhouette of some of the trees in the shot.


Basically when you shoot fireworks, you want to have a long enough exposure to capture the trails of light. I usually start with my camera set up like this: Aperture- f11, Shutter speed- 4 seconds, ISO- 200. Then I vary up my shutter speeds to get different looks and combinations of fireworks. If you have a 10 second or so shutter speed you can get more than one firework in the same frame.



If you start there, you can adjust depending on what look you're going for. I used a 20 second exposure for the above photo. Be careful not to go too long or it could look messy like the one below.


For the finale, you need to use shorter shutter speeds so the photo doesn't become a big ball of light. This one was only 4 seconds and it was too long.


Anyways, if you're still reading by now, you must be interested so I hope this was a help.