Welcoming The Year 2007

We used to walk down the street to Cagni Park to watch the fireworks years ago, then the city moved them to the new stadium and you have to drive to get there instead of just walking four blocks. Actually, the city only has fireworks for the Fourth of July celebration and this was New Years eve. This was everday people in the neighborhood firing them off. This particular rocket was only a couple of blocks away.

People had been setting off firecrackers for hours before midnight, but as the Magic Hour aproached the explosions became more frequent. I grabbed my trusty Bessa with its 15mm lens and headed out to the front yard. I'd already spotted a couple of rockets through the front window. The light on me is from the street light on the corner and it was just a matter of catching one of the rockets when it got near the top of its trip and exploded in the air. With ISO 200 color film the exposure on me was about 1/4 second at f/4.5 which is as wide as the diaphragm on the lens goes. The relatively slow shutter speed would alow the exploding rocket to streak a bit in the photo as red hot pieces spun outward into the air.

I got off about a dozen shots before my extended right arm, holding the camera, got too tired. This one was timed just right to catch the exploding fireworks, and yet I was able to hold both me and the camera steady enough so I came out looking sharp in the photo. Well, not perfectly sharp, but more than sharp enough. I was happy when I saw it. Thanks to Todd Frederick for his Photoshop skills in getting some reasonably normal color in both me and the shirt with the odd-ball color spectrum emitted by the hi-tech street light.