Happy 4th of July to my fellow Americans! I hope you’re enjoying some nice weather, friends/family, BBQ and fireworks.

I actually shot this view of the downtown Minneapolis skyline and Mississippi River during the “Aquatennial” fireworks last year.  Like a lot of my favorite projects, this one’s been buried for a year.  But with today being the 4th of July, I thought it was time to finally get after it!

This one was quite the project (3 hours of work, and probably more detail work when I print it).  I used Lumenzia to blend 14 images shot with my Nikon D810 and 24mm tilt-shift lens.  Fundamentally, the image has three parts:   the left and right side at blue hour, and the fireworks.  I blended 5 exposures for the left side and 4 for the right, and then stitched them together as a pano.  I then added 5 different fireworks images.   I replaced the sky with itself shifted down (to the get the clouds below the fireworks instead of directly behind them).  And then added several finishing touches to complete the mood.