We recently took a family trip to Montreal and Boston — so along with other things, it gave me a chance to put Olympus’ (relatively recent) “Live Composite” mode to work on Boston’s Independence Day fireworks.

For those of you unfamiliar with this, “Live Composite” is a feature of their OM-D cameras that allows you to do something like a long exposure — but without the usual risk that brings of overexposing parts of the image.  You set up your exposure settings, start “Live Comp,” then it only updates a part of the image if it has become brighter than before — so you wind up collecting sort of a “high water mark” for each pixel / color.

It’s easier to use than I’ve described it, as for the results, you can see for yourself:

This was my first real experience with Live Composite — I’ll definitely be writing more about it in the coming weeks…