Yup, it isn’t my first pyrotechnics presentation but it was my first one with music synchronization. I am always fascinated with the growing and improving arts in pyrotechnics. Much more when I discovered that they now use electronics for launch timings. The only thing that was preventing me from having fun was the rain. Yep, the rain was not a hindrance to the show since it is just light. But for shooting stills, it is not good. I have to wipe the lens everynow and then because umbrellas don’t work due to the light breeze present in the venue. To show you what I mean:
See the light spreads from each flares? Water droplets on the lens filter caused that
I used the same camera as before: Canon 400D. I asked my brother to switch his lens (because it’s his camera) from 50mm prime lens to the kit lens. I was aiming for the 18mm focal length so that I can shoot wide images and capture most of the fireworks. A friend also showed me a tutorial on how to shoot fireworks and good thing, I found the tripod used by my dad before but it was not high enough. However, bringing the camera any higher than it’s usual mount will make it unreachable for me. HAHAHAHA~! So I guess my dad’s tripod is enough. I set the ISO to 100 to get the clean shots, aperture to f/8 following the tutorial and most importantly, the shutter speed. 
Everything made sense at that particular moment and I was thinking of something similar before I get to see the tutorial. In the end, it was the shutter speed and stability that decided the outcome of the pictures. It is kinda hassle to change the camera settings during full, 15 minute fireworks bursts and I just aimed to get good shots, never mind if I did not get them all. It was a good practice since this is the first time I took shots of fireworks seriously. One problem though, since it is raining, quite a good amount of moisture was present in the atmosphere. That meant a difficult dispersion of smoke produced by explosions. To make sense of what I’m saying, it looks like this:
Just like hot springs…only glowing.
In the shot above, it happened that it looked good with the smoke but with other fireworks, it’s a disaster. It’s really baaaad, the effects are baaaad not for viewing but for shooting.
Nevertheless, the presentation was awesome, especially the one from Japan. Canada was also spectacular but with less excitement. It was a good, overall experience from getting to the venue and going home.
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