The Rocket's Red Glare

The best part of the Fourth of July is the fireworks. Anyone who tells you differently is a communist. :) Honestly, though... you can't celebrate the birth of a nation as great as ours without filling the valleys with the bursting of bombs and the sweet smell of sulfur. And while all of this is happening, I like to try to capture it on film. Digital film. Only communists use the traditional stuff anymore.

On Saturday night, I went down to watch the Stadium of Fire with some friends who live only a few blocks outside Lavell Edwards Stadium.

Our vantage point was such that I could get a pretty good shot of the fireworks. I set my camera to a 10 second shutter speed, an aperture of somewhere between f8 and f11, and let the magic happen.


While I love the way these turned out, I wish I had paid more attention to the white balance. I think I had it on auto, so sometimes colors would be pushed to white by the camera.


Love the blues in this one.


My personal favorite.

On Sunday night, we had a great dinner with the family and played games out on the deck in the late evening. It was heavenly. At dusk, though, the sky around us erupted into a cacophony of fiery popping and sizzling and I had to get up on the roof to record some of the action.

Using a long shutter speed again, I was able to illuminate the mountains behind the fireworks with the city lights.


The bursts of color were much smaller than with the stadium of fire, but so fun to see above the treeline of the city.


I went for more of a panoramic effect here. It was HARD to capture these, as I never knew where the next mini-show would pop up. Regardless, I had a ton of fun. :)

-Barry

Independence Day, Via JetBlue

Years ago, when I worked with jetBlue, I flew out to California with some friends for a day-trip on the Fourth of July. We explored the Hollywood Hills, admiring the impossibly large mansions the celebrities lived in, then wandered up and down Rodeo Drive, gawking at the impossibly high prices of the merchandise those celebrities bought. When that lost its novelty, we made our way to the coast where the rest of the day was spent playing at the beach, happily baking under the golden Southern California sun. The combined lack of worry, the smell of the ocean, and the inherent patriotism of the season made it seem as if we were living, for a day, straight out of a 50's Coke ad. I remember admiring the way the California haze distilled everything into warm, muted tones and wondering if Norman Rockwell himself painted what I beheld.

Like all wonderful days at the beach, that one came to an eventual end. As we made our way back to the airport, we stopped for dinner at a small sandwich shop where we bought cheese steaks from some gnarly gentlemen I can only label as typical California surfers. We were short on time, so we stowed our sandwiches in our backpacks to eat on the plane. Our flight lifted off just as the sun was setting, and as I settled into my seat at the window - cheese steak in hand - I watched the sun disappear into the ocean's burning horizon. Soon the golds and purples of the sunset gave way to deep blues of twilight which gave way to the dark of night. Being entirely spent from a day of fun, I seriously considered sleeping, and as I gazed into the hypnotizing blackness below, my eyes began to grow heavy. I remember the frail, electric skeleton of a city passing slowly underneath us. This caught my attention for a moment and I admired it's filaments of light branching out over the featureless landscape. Then suddenly, in the middle of it all, and to my great surprise, there appeared a tiny burst of cherry red explosions. I sat up. More bursts followed, littering the pocket-sized cityscape like neon confetti - a Fourth of July celebration on a lilliputian scale. It was incredible. And that wasn't the end of it, either. On that night, I had a ticket to every firework show over which our plane silently passed and a unique perspective on the celebration of our country's independence that I'll likely never experience again.

It was the perfect ending to an incredible day.

-Barry