New Year's Eve Fireworks

As I had hoped, I did get out to the township's New Years Eve fireworks display. It has been two-and-a-half years since I last photographed our town's fireworks on Canada Day, July 01. I sure hope they go ahead with it this year. Can't let COVID win everything.

Bob being Bob, we arrived almost an hour-and-a-half before the start. Bob is habitually better than punctual, but it was for good reason on this occasion if you look at the gate below.

Just inside the gate is the best place for photos. Bob parked in front so no one could drive in that way. They could still walk in but not drive in and obscure the view. It would have only prevented about six cars from filling the lane, but it made a big difference for us. Bob is a semi-official photographer for this event, so it was a measure that he felt empowered to take.

Speaking of gates and lights, doesn't the above photo look pretty? This ↓ is a photo of the old schoolhouse that you saw (above) beyond that gate. The crooked tree could drive a photographer crazy, and I felt compelled to straighten it in my fireworks photos.

There were other lighted outbuildings to the left of the gate. They were also very appealing.

When I have photographed fireworks here in town, I have been at a distance and used a telephoto lens. Here, I was close and decided to use my wide angle lens after some experimentation. That I had time to experiment and set up properly was a benefit of arriving so early.

I decided to place the tripod and camera just inside the gate with the widest setting that I could attain, which was 15mm. My hope was to look straight down the lane and capture the fireworks which would, hopefully line up. But I also wanted to capture enough of the buildings to draw some foreground interest. It worked pretty well although I ended up cropping much of the sky above the fireworks and some of the lane too. There might have been better setups, but you can't change you mind when the fireworks are in progress because they don't last for much more than 15 minutes.

With all of that palaver out of the way, here are three photos. I will be showing more firework photos in due course, some maybe even tomorrow. (Please observe the straightened tree at the right.)

I loved being able to do this again. It was only around freezing, and I was dressed warmly, so it was a lot of fun.

That was New Years Eve. We binge-watched Crime on Britbox on New Years Day. It was an interesting and very unusual police drama.

FYI for anyone who is wondering, I always shoot fireworks at ISO100, f11, 4 seconds. While there may be other good settings, it works, and fireworks are brief, so one just wants to shoot and not faff around with settings. So once I have everything dialed in, I don't touch anything for the duration of the show.