2006-07-09
For the impatient: Pictures
Explosive Sky Painting
A few of us ran out to local lake last week to catch a surprisingly spectacular celebration of the 230th anniversary of this nation's independence. Armed with an aging tripod, I had my first chance to capture fireworks! I think I liked (just a little) how it turned out.
We noticed a couple new features in this year's fireworks. The rapid fire flares were neat, as were the fireworks that were visibly lit on the way up.
In case you were curious about the camera settings, I kept the apertured as tiny as possible (f/8.0 in my case) and left the shutter open 2.0 seconds most of the time. I experimented a little with longer shutter times, but if you get too many fireworks in one shot, things get a little messy. Oh, and don't forget to turn off autofocus and manually focus on 'infinity'.