The celebrations on Beaver Island ended tonight with a beautiful show of fireworks, viewed from a friend who has a terrific view from their deck. The celebrations started earlier in the day with a picnic and parade - in extras album: http://365project.org/taffy/the-also-ran-ph/2015-07-04
And another fireworks... http://365project.org/taffy/special-photos/2015-07-04
I hope my US friends had fun today and all others are enjoying their weekend!
Oh YES! I was waiting for this. Not seeing any here...but here them in the "hood". Charlie is not too happy about it. This is really beautiful. You captured it so beautiful....love those reflections.
@redy4et There were only 2 in the entire show that ended up low enough to reflect so I was REALLY happy to catch this one! Thanks for the visits/comments today!
FAV -- beautiful firework and perfect capture! I was invited to go out in a boat last night where I could have seen fireworks from about 5 - 7 different cities along the lake but I declined . . . now wishing I had gone!
@jyokota Oh, that would have been wonderful! Although it was nice to be able to set the camera on the tripod and have it be in a stable place rather than bobbing about, but without camera, it would be so fun to be on the lake for fireworks!
Super fireworks shot... maybe one year, I can give this a try. A classically beautiful result - perfection, with reflections, to boot. Nice, nice work.
@shesnapped Thanks Ashley! I used manual, going by a bunch of articles I'd read during the day. Then I set the aperture initially to f11 and the ISO to 100, but it was too blown out. I wanted to keep noise low so didn't want to change ISO. I needed the long exposure to get the full spray movement. So I changed the aperture to f18 to f22 and experimented.
@taffy Thanks Taffy! I was with the grandbabies over the weekend, so no fireworks for us, but will be headed out next weekend to see some, so the info is much appreciated! Do you have any links that were especially helpful?
@shesnapped I didn't save any of them as they all basically repeated the same themes: use a tripod with an external shutter release; and then they gave ranges of what they thought to be the best combination of ISO (100 or less to 400) and aperture (f5.6 to 11 were the most common, but I still had to play with it and ended up much lower). The shutter speed most commonly recommended was bulb with a 2 - 6 second exposure. But a few said set at 6 seconds and adjust if needed. The thing is, each one is different so a standard setting really isn't that effective. What I did was, on bulb, as the firework was launched, I pressed the internal shutter and held it until the firework opened up and started fading. Then, I looked at what I had VERY QUICKLY and got a feel for what would be blown out or under exposed. I did it over and over and over so that sometimes I waited until it popped, opened and closed in maybe 3 seconds. Other times I saw the light of the launch and opened to catch the light 'stem' and closed once it had opened and some trailing occurred. You'll have great shots as long as you adjust after the first 2 or 3, and then just keep clicking! I ended up with almost 40 'useable' shots. I just did some cropping post processing and a little adjustment to exposure (up or down). I didn't need to do anything with saturation or color as that was fine, but there were a few I played around with. The ones I posted here, though, we adjusted pretty much with cropping and exposure/contrast sliders. Have fun!
Sounds like it was a great 4th of July!