Fireworks Photography

Though I usually skip the fireworks display on the Fourth of July, Ingrid talked me into going with her folks this year. We parked in the Haymarket, walked across the pedestrian bridge to the Saltdogs baseball field, AKA "Haymarket Park" and found a place not far from Oak Lake, which is where the fireworks were launched from. (A Map of the area)

Since I'd never tried fireworks photography before, I wasn't quite sure what to do---and I didn't bother reading up before I went. So based on a little advice from Javal last week, I used a tripod, manual focus (guessing at the "hyperfocal" point), and manual exposure. F-stops were from f/10 on up, and exposures were from 1 to 30 seconds. I used the mirror lock-up feature of the hacked 300D firmware, but still wished I had brought my homebrew remote shutter release.

I came up with a few decent shots. I shot "RAW", and the photos are unprocessed besides being converted to jpeg with default parameters and a 50% size reduction.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/jepler/emergent.unpythonic.net/index.cgi", line 766, in markup
    text = getattr(this_module, 'markup_'+command)(text, meta, **thing_context)
           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
AttributeError: module '__main__' has no attribute 'markup_comments_closed'


Entry first conceived on 5 August 2005, 5:00 UTC, last modified on 15 January 2012, 3:46 UTC
Website Copyright © 2004-2024 Jeff Epler