Amami Superman Photography

Here in Amami, the first weekend in August is the Amami Summer Festival. They have an hour long fireworks procession on Friday. I've only been taking photos now for about 7 months but this is one of the things I was really looking forward to.

I did my best to study up on how to take photos of fireworks and it paid off, but things didn't go exactly as I thought they would. Probably the biggest problem I had wasn't so much camera settings or anything of the sort, but the actual fireworks themselves. Every photo I've seen of fireworks, while studying, had the screen full of firework explosions and it all looked really neat. The problem with these fireworks is they all shot up in the same spot and exploded in just about the same spot and it got ugly really fast if I kept the shutter open too long. I could only take maybe 3 or 4 explosions worth of fireworks. I read plenty of places that said something of shutter speeds longer than 30 seconds. I found that wasn't the case with this procession.

Another problem I had was smoke. I was continually checking the breeze throughout the day to see which direction it was blowing. I had 3 spots picked out and I decided just before I left where to go. The wind completely died down and the smoke didn't really blow away. Most of the photos are a bit touched to reduce the amount of smoke in the photo. Also, most of the photos are cropped a bit. There were two or three different places they shot the fireworks from and it was a bit of a pain to adjust the camera to get things framed perfectly while trying to figure out where the next group would be going up from.




These are half the photos I chose to post. I'll post the rest in the next post.