Another try at Canada Day fireworks here in Hamilton. This time I went for a more picture-postcard approach, from a location across the harbour from Bayfront Park I’ve been meaning to try for some time.
I think it worked out pretty well, but would have liked to have been a bit more to the east so I could better line up the downtown Hamilton buildings in the background. The problem with the north shore of the harbour is that it is mostly wooded and there are very few open vantage points.
As far as the fireworks were concerned, I think I like the look of last year’s show better (after reviewing my photos in last year’s post).
Anyway, a bit of technical background. I set up three cameras this time instead of one. The plan was that a telephoto lens would be on one camera, another with a moderately wide lens, and the third one with an even wider lens. The camera with the telephoto lens was mounted to the tripod head, like normal. The other two cameras were clamped to the tripod with Manfrotto super clamps and magic arms
One of the cameras was triggered with an electronic cable release, which was locked in the ‘on’ position and the camera was set to continuous advance, so it was just a matter of starting the shooting and it would continue until I released the cable release. The Ricoh GXR (the third camera) has a built-in intervalometer, which came in handy. But the drawback with the GXR was that for long exposures it does dark frame subtraction for noise reduction. This seems to be automatic and can’t be disabled, and meant that for each 30 second exposure, it would wait another 30 seconds for the dark frame calculations. At least the Canons allow continuous shooting with virtually no delay between images.
There was also a nearly full moon, which kept the sky from going completely black.
And the images, in chronological order:
Nice shooting