I decided that this year I would head down to the Australia Day Celebrations run by Marrickville Council in Enmore Park. So after visiting G for a party at his place I headed down to Enmore Park to see the fire works. I have done the NYE fireworks before from my balcony, but this was the first time I had done fireworks from up close. So I took the tripod. I arrived before the fireworks were due to start to see the layout and get a good spot. There was a band playing and food stalls.
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There was also entertainment from various people and the chemical glow sticks were prevalent everywhere and there were lots of sparklers.
At first I was experimenting with the exposure time. What is a good time to get a decent spread of the fireworks, what is a good zoom level so that they fill up most of the frame. Should I try to get the crowd as well and how does one focus. The camera has trouble focusing at times in the dark, but it turned out that because the fire works are very bright, this was not much of a problem.
At one stage I knocked the focus onto manual and hence got some out of focus shots. But this too was not too bad. A bit of a James approach to focus here, though James would manage to get a single firework in focus.
I also tried portrait rather than landscape.
Towards the end I was moving the tripod around quite a bit and taking lots of shots. The problem with taking lots of shots is that the camera cannot keep up becuase of the limited write speed to the memory card. So sometimes the photo would happen some time after I pressed the button and would happen while I was reframing by moving the tripod or pivoting the camera.
And there were lots of different effects. The fireworks went for quite a while and I was pleased when they ended as I needed to go away and see the results before doing some more.
The walk back was interesting. As it was the end of the night there was a traffic jam and so many people walking down Victoria Road that I thought it must be like what it had been back in the days before there were cars.