We drove to the area near the Lakewood Country Club, which is not too far from where we live on the east side of Dallas. We found a good place to sit right across the street from the country club's driving range. Telephone lines are just barely visible in some shots but otherwise I had a clear view. I placed the K10D on the tripod, and in the Fn menus configured the camera's shooting mode so I could trigger the shutter with the infrared remote. The camera settings were simple: M mode, ISO 100, aperture f/11, shutter 2 seconds (sometimes just 1.5). I used my standard outdoors lens, a Tamron AF (IF) 18-250 f/3.5-6.3 LD Di. Because I couldn't be sure where in the sky the fireworks would explode I experimented a bit with the focal length. In the end 30mm or thereabouts seemed to work pretty well. I set the camera to manual focus and used the distance markings on the lens barrel to set it manually to just a bit less than infinity. I did have the camera's LCD display the photos for 1 second. After the first few fireworks went off, the instant review helped me quickly identify and resolve a couple problems: that the camera wasn't aimed quite right, focus wasn't right, initial shutter setting of 1 second was too slow, field of vision wasn't wide enough. After getting everything set up and resolving these initial problems, the biggest challenge was making a good guess about when to trigger the shutter. I'd watch the rocket go up and try to click just a split second before the burst.
Post-processing was remarkably easy. I cropped a few photos. Most of the photos got a slight adjustment on the clarity slider in Lightroom 1.1 and in the tone curves, I narrowed the dark tones to just 15% of the range and then made the extreme blacks very dark black, to provide a nice sharp background sky. But I did very little else.
Is it possible for a photo to be really good if it contains nothing but the burst of the rocket? I doubt it. Abstract colored patterns are interesting, and I suppose it's true that every burst is unique. But to be really compelling, I think a photo of fireworks would need to have something else in it, perhaps a compelling landmark like the Statue of Liberty (not handy here in Dallas) or at least the silhouetted head of a child. I had no landmarks available, not even a tree, and I'd have had to push my daughter into the street to get her into the shoots, and my wife would have objected. Still, it was a pleasant exercise. And since I was using the remote to trigger the photos, I got to enjoy the show personally as well and without the usual tunnel vision that I experience, say, when shooting sports.
You can view the entire gallery here.
