When I was a child on Fire Island one and one time only I experienced fireworks directly overhead of sufficient power to light up the entire sky like the Northern Lights. I will never forget it. Nor a performance when I was a teen of the 1812 Overture with fireworks timed with cannon-firings in the live outdoor (obviously) performance.
There are some things that the realism of photography, with all its capacities to signal more than was intended in the framing, cannot do.
Hmmm..... Well, I've just taken a bunch of fireworks photos so this is on my mind. The thing is, my camera is not particularly good in low light. I can't get nice crisp shots of the incendiaries flying about. Sometimes the camera moves too much (I'm shooting handheld); I can toss those out. And sometimes, much/most of the time, the focus is soft. That's OK. Because the imagine is always dim and sketchy. So to get a decent amount of light I have to ramp up the exposure, which forces a cascade of other adjustments – as I'm sure you can appreciate (I work in Lightroom too, though sometimes move to Photoshop for more work). But if things work well, I end up with nicely shaded billows of cloudy-color punctuated by dots and streaks of light. Not at all what my eye saw, but then NO photo EVER IS what the eye saw.
Moreover, I live in Hoboken, NJ, on the west bank of the Hudson River across from Lower Manhattan and just north of Jersey City. Both NYC and Jersey City had fireworks. So OTOH I've got fireworks looming up behind the Manhattan skyline (they're launched from barges in the East River) and OTOH I've got them peeking from behind and over Stevens Point (highest point in Hoboken) to the south.
But it does take a bit of work to pull images out of those shots.
And then there's shaky-cam, long manual exposures in low light in which you zoom and pan the lens so you can 'paint' with the light of the city.
When I was a child on Fire Island one and one time only I experienced fireworks directly overhead of sufficient power to light up the entire sky like the Northern Lights. I will never forget it. Nor a performance when I was a teen of the 1812 Overture with fireworks timed with cannon-firings in the live outdoor (obviously) performance.
There are some things that the realism of photography, with all its capacities to signal more than was intended in the framing, cannot do.
Hmmm..... Well, I've just taken a bunch of fireworks photos so this is on my mind. The thing is, my camera is not particularly good in low light. I can't get nice crisp shots of the incendiaries flying about. Sometimes the camera moves too much (I'm shooting handheld); I can toss those out. And sometimes, much/most of the time, the focus is soft. That's OK. Because the imagine is always dim and sketchy. So to get a decent amount of light I have to ramp up the exposure, which forces a cascade of other adjustments – as I'm sure you can appreciate (I work in Lightroom too, though sometimes move to Photoshop for more work). But if things work well, I end up with nicely shaded billows of cloudy-color punctuated by dots and streaks of light. Not at all what my eye saw, but then NO photo EVER IS what the eye saw.
Moreover, I live in Hoboken, NJ, on the west bank of the Hudson River across from Lower Manhattan and just north of Jersey City. Both NYC and Jersey City had fireworks. So OTOH I've got fireworks looming up behind the Manhattan skyline (they're launched from barges in the East River) and OTOH I've got them peeking from behind and over Stevens Point (highest point in Hoboken) to the south.
But it does take a bit of work to pull images out of those shots.
And then there's shaky-cam, long manual exposures in low light in which you zoom and pan the lens so you can 'paint' with the light of the city.