Kyna was extremely excited to be seeing fireworks up close. That is, until they started.
After two teeth rattling WHOMPS! She began to plead loudly, urging us to flee this dangerous place. Every time a large drooping firework went off, which would be all of them, she would panic that it was going to napalm us into swiss cheese. To comfort her I hoisted all forty eight pounds onto my hip (so I could still stand an operate my camera which was on a tripod) and tried to talk her down. About five minutes into the show my camera battery died. I'm prepared like that. Free from distraction we sat down and practiced breathing together. I used all my best associative words to curb her panic, 'ohhh that looks like fairy dust' and 'sparkly!'
By the grand finale she was loving it and having mastered her fears she clapped her hands in delight exclaiming, "at the end they should do a big '
M' for America!"
"Oh Honey. You have
no idea how awesome that
would be."
Technicalish Babble:
This is my first ever fireworks photograph. For a first attempt and
given the restrictions I was working with (see above), I'm
quite pleased. In the two seconds before I ran out the door at eight
thirty Friday night I did a quick search for tips on how to photograph
fireworks. For those of you who care, the details are thus: since I do
not own a remote release device I used an eight second shutter speed
(on a tripod of course), with an aperture of f/11. Next fourth I will be
investing in a remote release device so I can shoot in bulb mode which should give me more control over exposure times. I'll also probably stop down a bit and try to get some cityscape in the photos as well. I'd like to
get a shot similar to
these beautiful examples. If you like photography
and have a manual mode on your camera I strongly suggest trying something similar to the
above, it is extremely easy to get fantastic shots.
