Happy New Year 2017

It’s 2017! I hope you enjoyed New Year’s Eve as much as we did and when you awoke this morning, I hope you still feel the same way!

We spent a quiet evening at home with our daughter Jaime, son-in-law Andrew and our two grandsons, Fynn and Wyatt. The boys are still a little young to grasp the meaning of the holiday. Christmas’ appeal was much more more obvious. We did take them out for Canmore’s New Year’s Eve celebration for the children, a fireworks display held at the Town’s skating pond. The pond was very crowded with skaters and many others just there to witness the evening’s spectacle. It was quite a party, with music, hot chocolate and hot dogs. What more could a kid want?  At 8:30 pm, the show began and we were all bedazzled with a wonderful light show. Kudos to the Town of Canmore for staging such a great event.

After the boys went to bed, we enjoyed a quiet evening at home. Of course, the photographer can never get enough, so just before midnight, I trudged out to a nearby vantage point where I could photograph and enjoy the main event, Canmore’s annual New Year’s Eve fireworks show. It was a beautiful evening, not cold, not windy and snowing lightly. It was over pretty quickly and I called it a day. (An Eve?)

Since this is a photo blog, I’ve included a brief slideshow featuring some photos from both fireworks displays. Click on the right to advance; on the left to reverse. Hope you enjoy.

Best wishes for a happy, healthy and and prosperous 2017.

For the photographers, a few thoughts on how to photograph fireworks. It may seem counter-intuitive, but I prefer to take a long exposure. This achieves two things; it enables you to expose the the entire image and it creates some very interesting effects. Your photograph is much more interesting if you include some context, in other words the surroundings around the fireworks display. By keeping the shutter open for an extended period, you can capture several different bursts of light, all recorded on your image. You also get a soft, streaming effect as the elements of light move across the sky.

To achieve a sufficiently long exposure (> 30 seconds), you may need to use the bulb exposure setting on your camera. This setting enables you to keep the shutter open as long as you want, a manual operation that may require a little experimentation to get the desired result. (Suggest you do that before the fireworks begin to determine how long the shutter need remain open for a good exposure of the surroundings). You’ll need a remote switch (a cable release or wireless) to lock and unlock the shutter. Set up your camera as follows:

Aperture: f/8 to f/16 (the smaller the aperture the longer the shutter opening you’ll need)

ISO: 100

Focal length: Wide angle (17-40 mm is good)

Focus: Infinity

You’ll need a tripod (and a flashlight is helpful to help you see what you are doing). When you are set, simply open and lock the shutter with your remote switch to take your shot. (Using an aperture of f/11, I needed about 35-45 seconds to expose the shots I’ve posted today.) You unlock and close the shutter to complete the picture and you can immediately re-open to begin another. It’s good to take a short pause occasionally to check your results, but generally you need to keep shooting. With long exposures (45 sec) and a short fireworks show (15 min), you’ll do well to get 12- 15 shots.