Disappointment

I didn’t get the memo. So, there I was Thursday night, sitting here minding my own business, wondering just why it was all the yahoos in my general vicinity couldn’t wait until the Fourth to shoot off their damned fireworks. Nope, they couldn’t wait… they HAD to blow off the inventory a day early. And then… “Whoosh-ka-BOOM! Whooosh-ka-BOOM-BOOM!” “Hey!”... sez I to myself... “Those weren’t backyard fireworks I just heard, that’s the Real Deal!” A quick peek out the window revealed that, yes, those reports actually were part of the Big Civic Fireworks Production that takes place every year at Eastern NM U’s athletic fields, just behind El Casa Móvil De Pennington.

So, I grab the camera out of the camera bag, set the controls to aperture-priority shooting, open the lens as wide as it will go, and step outside to enjoy the fireworks and take some pics. I took a couple of shots and realized things would probably go a lot better if I set the camera to “continuous shooting” rather than single shot, which is the default. I stepped back inside (where there was light) and set the camera to “continuous shooting.” Once back outside I realized immediately things weren’t going smoothly. The camera’s electronics were apparently confused by the slow shutter speed and the demands of continuous shooting, because it (the camera) wouldn’t shoot consistently in continuous mode. I’d get a burst of two or three photos and then the camera would hang momentarily in the “mirror up” position. That’s pretty disconcerting, to say the very least. And then I must have inadvertently hit a button on the camera by accident, because I realized I’d somehow reverted to single-shot mode. Frustrating. And that's the way it went for the duration of the show.

So… we finally arrive at this post’s title: disappointment. I took 56 photos, 12 of which were totally black and were discarded right off the bat. I saved 42 of the remaining 44 photos I downloaded to the PeeSee but none were “keepers,” in truth. Most came out looking like this:

Which is interesting, I suppose, but it’s not what I wanted. I wanted stuff sorta like this:

And those two shots were as good as it got. Compare these two shots to the pics of the fireworks I took four years ago with my old G5; the G5 pics are much better. I think there are a few reasons for this. First, I was caught by surprise and was unprepared Thursday night. I didn’t do my homework, most especially by consulting my manual to see if there are any low-light limitations with continuous shooting. Second, the SLR’s lens is “longer” than the G5’s, which makes composing a little more difficult. Third, composing a rapidly moving subject through the camera’s viewfinder is considerably more difficult than composing on an LCD screen. The end result is lousy photos, thus: disappointment. Which says everything about the workman and little to nothing about his tools, eh?

The fireworks were good, though. Lotsa oohs, aahs, and applause could be heard throughout Beautiful La Hacienda Trailer Park, along with joyous shrieks from the very little kids. And all the local yahoos went back to shooting off their own stuff once The Big Show was over, even if it was a day early. Last night was pretty quiet by comparison, but not completely without the odd boom and whistle here and there... until well after midnight. It's a great good thing no one had to be at work today, eh?