America's birthday

To create this composite for America's birthday, I started with a daylight image of the Statue of Liberty in diffused light, selected the background in Photoshop and filled it with black (Edit > fill), and then pasted in several different fireworks shots. After each image was pasted into the background, I used the blend mode 'lighten'. This command can be found in the layers palette when you click and pull down the submenu with the tab 'normal'. The lighten blend mode makes the fireworks background look like one photo because each of the bursts blends together exactly as they would look if this were, in fact, one exposure. When I shoot fireworks, my exposures are typically 1.6 seconds, f/8, ISO 200, and my lens of choice is a 24 - 105mm zoom. I use a tripod as well.