Bombs Per Minute at the PIAF

[rogerg]

G'day all,

I had a break from astronomy last night and went to the opening event for the Perth International Arts Festival. Each year we regret forgetting about the event so this time I booked it in my calendar early and made the effort to go.

The event was good, more fireworks than I've experienced! At least 45 minutes of almost continuous fireworks.

I wouldn't have liked to had young kids there. With everyone standing they wouldn't have seen much :( So it wasn't all good, but I did enjoy it and nabbed some great pics of the stage & fireworks with the nifty 50 f/1.4 @ f/2.8.

One image uploaded as a teaser, the rest are at my website:

http://rogergroom.com/landscape-nature-photography/perth-international-arts-festival-bombs-per-minute-9th-february-2013/

was good fun to be taking fireworks photo's again after so many years of not having done so :)

[iceman]

Great pic! Sets the scene!

[rogerg]

Thanks Mike :)

[AstralTraveller]

Very nice. Can I ask how long were the exposures. In my sole attempt I found there to be a trade off between long trails and excess background haze. Three to five seconds seemed to be best.

[rogerg]

In this case all the exposures were very short. I was using the 50mm at f/2.8 and f/2.2 at ISO 2500 and 3200. Exposure times were faster than 1/30th sec and probably up to 160th/sec I think. Every exposure was a bracket of +/- 2 stops, sometimes only one stop.

For fireworks I would ordinarily do longer exposures on a tripod. In this situation the event was a standing event so tripod wasn't going to be tall enough. At first I was disappointing and didn't hold much hope of good pics. Many of the shots were with the camera being held above my head.

As it happens, I think the short exposures worked well in this situation. I looked at some taken by The West newspaper which were typical longer exposures on a tripod and didn't like them so much, the trailing didn't work well for this event. Chance :)

[rcheshire]

Wonderful shot Roger. Love it.

[MrB]

Nice shot Roger.
An interesting astronomy related aside, did you know that particular type of firework you have captured are known in the industry as Comets?
Also, the individual pellets of composition that go into aerial shells are known as Stars ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_(pyrotechnics)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrotechnic_star