Thursday, July 5, 2012

Fireworks! Ohhhh! Ahhhhh!

It's been so long since I've posted here it seems like one of the last posts I did was of my pictures from last Fourth of July. Actually, that's pretty close to the truth. Also, there's a strange new interface. Not sure I like it.

Anyway, forgive me?

A lot of you may have seen these elsewhere, but for those who haven't, I present them for your approval. This picture was shot at my standard fireworks setting: ISO 100 at f/8 for 1.6 seconds. Over the years I've come to rely on this setting since it generally produces some pretty good pictures.  

  
That's not to say I'm afraid to try new things. Since the show was about 20 minutes long, I reset my camera to test the "burst" method I'd read about earlier this week. Using the burst technique, the camera is set to ISO 200 at f/11, but the exposure is set to bulb. In this case, the exposure is about 5 seconds and multiple bursts are captured. 

I kinda like it. 

The rest of these are back to the standard ISO 100, f/8 with slightly varying shutter speeds. I didn't want to rely completely on a new technique.



This final shot was a bit of luck combine with my keeping my head up as I was riding my bike home. I caught a glimpse of the almost full buck moon rising through the pines along the Potomac and had to stop. Even luckier, they were still shooting fireworks over in PG county. All the streaks of light you see at the bottom of the frame are boats heading down the Potomac after the fireworks. It was just like the Queen's flotilla. OK, maybe not.
If you'd like to see more of my fireworks pictures, head over to my Flickr page linked over there on the right side of this page. Hope everyone had a good Fourth, and I promise to try to post more. Yep, I know, famous last words.