Thursday, July 31, 2008

fun fest fireworks

A couple of weeks ago, I promised pictures of the Fun Fest fireworks. I'm finally following through on my promise. :) Nelson had read about a camera technique for taking photos of fireworks, and he tested it out that evening. He took 154 pictures! I don't think Blogger would be very happy with me if I posted that many pics, so I've been trying to pick some of the clearer shots. They still don't do it justice--nothing beats being there in person. But I think he did a great job capturing the colorful displays.

I was actually pleasantly surprised by the Fun Fest fireworks. Most towns spend their "budget" on the 4th of July show, and if there's an event meriting fireworks at some other time it tends to be pretty lame. Not so with Kingsport and Fun Fest! I was expecting a short, cheesy event, but that's not what we got. It was a great display, and we thoroughly enjoyed it. Sarah especially liked the fireworks that made a smiley face. :) If you live in a big metropolis, you probably wouldn't be impressed, but we had a great time watching a surprisingly good show.

So here are some highlights.















Yeah, so this isn't actually fireworks. But we thought the moon looked really cool that night!

3 comments:

Tana said...

awesome pics. i particularly like the one at the top and the 4th one down. good job, nelson (and way to narrow down the field, kare...good picks of pics)!

Tara said...

Great photos Nelson! I like the 4th one down a lot too. I'll have to get these photo tips from you before the next 4th of July because my pictures this year came out pretty crappy. lol!

Nelson said...

Here's the link for the article where I found the tips I used. Some of them will depend on your camera's capabilities, such as the open-shutter time.

http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/324774533/get-better-fireworks-photos-this-fourth-of-july

I started off using a 5-second open-shutter time, but I decided that was too long, so I dropped it to 2 seconds. Also, I set my camera's exposure compensation to the tungsten light setting, turned off the flash, and set the camera's ISO to 80, as low as it would go.

Next time we have fireworks here, which'll probably be Kingsport's First Night show on New Year's Day, I'll have a tripod and a camera modification which will allow me to use a remote shutter trigger. That combination will kill the vibration-induced fuzziness in some of the other pics.