Happy Independence Day!

Click now for JiffNotes

To all my fellow Americans, Happy Independence Day! Hope you get to see some good fireworks tonight!

I took these pictures last year, and it will be interesting to see if I can improve my technique this year. I will use a tripod this year, so that should help. Here's what we can see from our deck:

 

That's looking towards Centennial Olympic Park. If we look to our right, we can usually catch bits of at least three other far-off fireworks displays.

If I let the camera do what it wants on auto, it wants to brighten up the whole shot.

 

So I started playing around with the shutter speed. At first, I thought I wanted a relatively long shutter speed, thinking that catching the trails of the fireworks would look cool. But I found I liked the sharper look.

 

The real challenge seems to be getting a good point of focus; this year when I'm using the tripod, I'll manually focus in advance. The camera had to focus on something, so it was picking the buildings in the background, which didn't necessarily make for the sharpest focus on the fireworks.

If I cranked the shutter speed too fast, it wouldn't even capture the pinpoints lights of the fireworks that well.

 

This is one of my favorites...seems to be a good balance!

 

We'll see how I do this year!

JiffNotes
I like to watch fireworks up close, but it seems safer to do it from our deck!