Fireworks in the North Woods (DIAL-UP -- IF ANYONE STILL HAS IT -- WARNING)

[regnaD kciN]

The long weekend where nothing worked out exactly as planned came to a similar conclusion on the 4th, but with a better outcome than I was expecting.

Originally, I was planning to shoot the famous Seattle display at Lake Union, and had picked out a couple of good vantage points away from the main crowd. Unfortunately, by the time I got there in the late afternoon, a few hundred (thousand?) people had already taken up residence in one of them, while the roads to the other were inaccessible. Any shots I could hope to take would wind up with the display blocked by trees, power poles, buildings, or the heads of hundreds of people. Oh, well, on to Plan B, which was to return home and shoot the same local Lake Wilderness display I had photographed for most of the past several years.

There were pluses and minuses to this choice. I've been there often enough to know the best vantage point to set up a tripod, and the event isn't so crowded that I would have to worry about not being able to find room there. The fireworks are over a forest-rimmed lake, which provides a nice background when you combine it with our northerly location that results in quite a bit of color in the sky at 10:00 P.M. on summer evenings. The drawback to shooting this display is that you are really right underneath the fireworks, which requires a wide-angle lens and makes anticipating the framing a real trick. Zoom in too close, and one of the higher-level rockets will leave you with nothing the bottom third of the burst at the very top of your frame. Zoom out to cover the entire sky, and lower-level rockets will be so small you'll have to crop the shot down to around 2MP -- in other words, only suitable for web display -- to get a decent image. Switch to vertical mode, and the next few bursts will be guaranteed to spread across the sky from left to right, so you'll miss all but the a small slice of the display. And so on. In other words, once you get the basics of exposure, etc. right, it really becomes a matter of correctly anticipating -- or some might say outguessing -- the people running the display.

Last year's attempt at this location was not fun. For whatever reason, I seemed to guess wrong on just about every change in the program. If the "outguessing" comment above puts anyone in mind of the pitcher-batter duel in baseball, let's just say that, last year, the designer of the display was Sandy Koufax and I was, well, Charlie Brown. Not an enjoyable experience.

Well, let's just say that things were different this year. Either I had a better sense of what was about to happen, or the designer decided to be merciful this time around, but I was able to set up a general framing, and only had to shift it a couple of times. I conceded the low-level bursts, and, while a few of the higher-level ones were out of my frame, most were right where I was hoping they would be. I took fifty-eight shots during the sixteen-minute display, and only a handful of them had to be discarded or were otherwise unsatisfactory. Here's a selection of the better ones, in chronological order.

Sony Alpha 100, Sigma 10-20mm, f/8-f/11 (depending on shot), "bulb" exposure (controlled by cable release, generally around 12-15s)

[Callalily]

1. Guess your weekend went out

with a bang! (groan)

These are remarkable and the colors are so vibrant. I particularly like photo number 4. The reflection on the water is an added bonus.