Happy New Year. This was taken at the Ferry Meadows firework display in the UK. The glowing effect is made by first raterizing the text. This changes it from a vector to pixels. Once in pixel you have a lot more options in photoshop. By using Gaussian blur on a copy of the text layer below you can create the glow.

Last night we went to the Ferry Meadows Firework Display. This was taken at the end of the display. It was the second time I have photographed it with two cameras. I set up my prime lens to capture the reflection across the water on a fixed tripod.  The second body had my wide angle on a tripod I could quickly point at any point of the sky. Both cameras fire almost continuously throughout the display. This is one of the rare times I do not shot in RAW. By recording jpegs only you stop the cameras slowing down as the backlog of large RAW files fill up the cameras buffer while they wait to write to the card. Firework displays are very much a batch exercise as its hard to predict what you will capture in a 4 second exposure. I took 217 images, I cut theses down to 45, Cropped a few and submitted them to Shutterstock. After a couple of days just these 2 firework shots were accepted.

All stock agencies offer some form of enhanced or extended license, in which buyers are given unlimited rights to reproduce photographs, typically over 250,000 times. In the case of Shutterstock the contributing photographer receives $28 instead of 0.25c/0.33c. Its always a nice surprise when you sell one. This is only the sixth enhanced licenses image I have sold compared with over 3000 regular sales.

Download high resolution image.

See other five Enhanced sales

This is my most popular stock photo. It has been accepted at five agencies. Putting the same image at different agencies is a common practice as the photographer keeps the copyright to an image whoever sells it. Since taking it in 2006 is has sold 263 times and made $82(£50) so far. In an attempt to replicate its success I have been to a further five firework displays but not yet taken a shot which has matched its popularity. In the end I took the original image turned it blue and resubmitted it to Shutterstock. The blue version has now sold 42 times.

For this blog post I used the Orton Effect on the images to see what would happen.

This image started life as a firework. I chose this shot as it caught the very start of an explosion so none of the light trails has time to dip down from gravity. I used alternating effects of Stained Glass and Neon Glow until I got the final image.

Happy New Year. This is Benz World’s first creation of the decade. I used Gaussian Blur on the lower text layer to make the glowing effect. Here are more fireworks from this display.