Monday, July 5, 2010

The Rockets' Red, Squiggly, Glowy Thing

Image credit: All images by Cujo359

This year, I tried using the "fireworks" setting on my camera for the first time. This setting uses a long exposure, and seems to adjust the contrast somewhat to make the fireworks nicely visible without being washed out. It really requires a tripod, or a very steady hand. After standing more or less in the same spot for several hours, I had neither. As you can see, the results were what might have been considered artistic in the days of film cameras. Now, they just elicit comments like "Dude, you need a faster ISO".

At the location we were at, many people brought their own fireworks. This is one of the better pictures of their endeavors:

Sometimes. it was hard know where the fireworks would happen. This would have made it tough to use a tripod, I think:

Thankfully, as the evening wore on, the fireworks became more frequent, as well as more predictable:

Some of the images didn't look half bad:

Click on the images to enlarge.

If you want to see how a modern digital camera handles fireworks, you might want to check out Dana Hunter's pictures

2 comments:

Dana Hunter said...

Wow. Some of those turned out very well indeed! A few are rather better than mine. Half the fun in this is getting images that look like they either came from Hubble or from a particle accelerator. Oh, and not getting blown up in the process. All in all, I'd call your efforts a rousing success!

Cujo359 said...

Thank you. I think some of yours had better detail. My camera does seem to be good at focusing on high contrast light and getting the settings right.