As it turns out, the next shoot I did after the Mainx24 Parade was yet another parade.  Since I’m not ready to blog about another parade yet, I thought I would jump to the end of the evening and go with the fireworks display that closed the holiday celebration.

I always see these fantastic fireworks shots that have zero smoke in them and just streaks of color shooting across the sky.  I don’t know how they get those shots.  I’ve spent a little time searching for tips on how to prevent smoke, but none of them seem to help much other than the possibility of doing something in post processing to darken the smoke so it blends in better.  I guess I will have to experiment.

As it is, the video was made from the 550+ shots with no post-processing.  I will pick a few for post-processing later.  Today, I was only up for making a movie.

The irony of me making a movie out of my stills is that my camera will shoot video.  I have used it to shoot a video once so far.  I didn’t think I could see well enough to focus manually and I found the autofocus function quite disruptive.  I also discovered iMovie, the only video editing software I have, removed the feature to easily capture stills from video, so you have to go through a couple extra hoops and use another application to get a still from video.  I find this annoying.  Since I generally want stills, it seems easier to shoot stills and make a movie later if I want a video.

I didn’t plan to shoot the fireworks.  I just happen to have a great view of them from my balcony and it seemed a waste not to shoot them.  I did several things wrong during the shoot.

First, forgive me for repeating myself, I didn’t plan to shoot the fireworks. As a last minute decision, I was rushing to get setup on the balcony and failed to notice in the dark that I had part of the top of the balcony in the frame.  This is going to result in more cropping than I planned for.

Second, about half way through the show, I couldn’t remember if I had focused at any point or not.  This is not the time to have memory failure.  Although, I suppose it is better than at the end of the show.  I couldn’t really notice when the focus changed in the video, but the background buildings look blurry.

Third, I forgot to change the ISO setting from shooting very dark scenes and trying to get a faster shutter speed.  This led to much shorter shutter speeds than I would have liked.

Finally, I also forgot to set it on aperture priority and I was shooting so fast, I didn’t check the images.  Alas, I blew out the images with really bright bursts.

Other than that, my shots are great.  🙂

Related articles

• Parade Shooting (nomadicmainstream.com)
• Balcony Shooting (nomadicmainstream.com)
• shooting fireworks (cyrographics.wordpress.com)