Fourth of July

[LCHIEN]

Went to a Fourth of July fireworks display at a different location than my usual.
The fireworks only lasted 15 minutes instead of 30 and the variety and color complexity was much less.

Used my newest camera which has a "Livetime" view you can see the picture as it accumulates the light and cut it off when its exposed to your liking - great for fireworks where you are not sure of the time because there are overlapping bursts in quick sequence. It's like "Bulb" except with a live display.

Anyway these are a couple of the good shots. First one was f7 for 5 seconds, the second was f7 for 7 seconds. 85mm crop equivalent lens.

[All Thumbs]

That (camera) sounds neat, it is doing the processing real-time and allowing you to press the shutter button when you like what you see?

[atgcpaul]

Tripod, yes?

We went to our usual place which is the fairgrounds by our house. The 4th is also my older daughter's birthday. She's 5 now.

We got the full 30 minutes or so. They seemed louder than usual even though we were further away than we usually are. It seems every year they unveil a new firework. This year was one that looked like someone sprinkled super shimmery glitter in the sky. I thought it was pretty impressive.

[phrog]

Terrific photos, Loring. Did you use a tripod with those long exposures?

[LCHIEN]

That (camera) sounds neat, it is doing the processing real-time and allowing you to press the shutter button when you like what you see?

Yes, the LCD shows the cumulative exposure as it happens. Takes several seconds to write out to storage after you click the second time. Not sure why yet.

[LCHIEN]

Tripod is an absolute must for those long exposures.
Here's one I did for 22 seconds at f11 and ISO 200, effective crop focal length of 98mm about 15 minutes before fireworks as a test, using liveview.
The streaks at the bottom are car lights going back and forth on the street.
I had hoped to get the fireworks behind the tower but I didn't know the exact position of the launch and I was off too much. They were to the left.

this was really just at dusk and I used the small aperture to make sure I got several cars going totally by for smooth light trails.
In contrast, for the fireworks I used a wider aperture selected to expose the fireworks trails properly. Thee trails were of more or less fixed duration and the time was selected on the fly to capture more or less trails in the frame. The sky was mostly dark at this time except for scattered light from smoke so the length of exposure lightened the sky only a little as I increased the exposure time. I tried to time the start and stop to points where the sky would not brighten too much yet still capture multiple trails.

[radhak]

Neat Pictures, Loring! That last one is beautiful too!

I'll try and upload some of the pictures I took...

[radhak]

Took me all this while to upload my pics!

All taken with a Nikon D90, exposure ranging from 5 seconds to 16 seconds.