Fourth of July, 2006

This was the second year I went out to Grapevine Lake to watch the Fourth of July fireworks show. I had better luck this time getting good pictures; I used what I had learned the previous year. For many of the shots, I used the self-timer, and set it for two seconds. It was a little tricky timing the shots not knowing exactly when the next fireworks would go off, and of course I had to time it two seconds ahead of time. However, using the timer meant that my hands were not touching the camera when it took the shot. This eliminated camera shake.

I used the camera's autofocus feature. I would hold the shutter button down just enough to trigger the autofocus. Sometimes it would take several tries before the camera focused on the fireworks correctly. I would have focused the camera manually, but I've found it very difficult to manually focus the Fuji S5100, especially at night, so I relied on autofocus.

A lot of it is just plain luck, and for every good picture, there are two not so good ones. One thing that I wish I had done differently was to use portrait rather than landscape orientation. It makes perfect sense to shoot fireworks with portrait, but it never crossed my mind. There's always next year...