now its the 4th!

Now it is the 4th, after almost a week of neighborhood fireworks it is finally the actual day of fireworks. After moving out to the Midwest, I now see other differences, here it is legal to have your own fireworks shows, I guess if helps that the brush is very green here compared to dry and drought ridden California. Anyway, enough babbling. Went to a show with some friends, took my camera, the rest are photos.

Everyone likes kids; here is a friend’s son who thoroughly enjoyed his first Sparklers.
Technical Jumbo:
Simple shot, wide angle zoom, manual meter for ambient light.

This got a little fun, ambient light was almost gone so I broke out the strobe (actually brought it this time, good job Matt) and put on the borrowed wide angle zoom, metered for ambient light, in this case leaving some color in the sky, and placed the strobe at -1 stop. Getting the strobe off camera is the key here; some are in my left hand away from camera zero, some I placed the strobe on the ground facing up at people. The long exposure shot I just cycled to a slow shutter, and its respective aperture to maintain same exposure and let the iTTL compensate for smaller f-stop.

Decided what shots I wanted before hand and waited for those shots, I then enjoyed the show from there. I knew I wanted the lake shot to have some color in the sky, so I shot it in the beginning so that I could still have some light in the sky, I exposed for that color and tried to get about a 2-4 second exposure; shot off about 5-8 shots and went back to the group. Shot with a wide angle zoom on a tripod, couple seconds at f8 or so, iso 400.

Next I know I wanted to get the trail of the launching fireworks so I switched to a telephoto zoom, metered for a longer exposure and there it is. (Actually the important part of the exposure in the aperture, after dark the shutter will give you longer “trails” of light and not necessarily a brighter image and the aperture will control brightness of the trails. Flash works very similarly.)