Happy New Year!

Ok, so the New Year has already gone (both the western New Year and the chinese New Year) but I still am going to post this.

I was sitting on our balcony with my wife and looking at the fireworks shot by others, some of which exploded at alarmingly low altitude, I had an idea. I went back into the house, grabbed my camera and decided to try and take some shots.

Well, it wasn't quite that easy. First the automatics in the camera wanted to have way too long exposure time, being dark and all outside, so I hit the ISO value all the way up to 1600. Still too long, the camera shook too much. Then I took a look at the pictures taken so far and found out them to be too light to give any justoce to the fire work. So I used manual settings and set the aperture size all the way up to get the exposure time down. This way I got darker pictures from which the fireworks display show up pretty nice. Or would have shown if I had had better reactions.

A dilemma. I had to flip the camera to sports mode and set it to underexpose as much as it was possible with the (fine) tune of automatic settings. Lo and behold! I managed to capture an explosion! The exposure time wass still a bit long as you can see but luckily image stabilizer saved the pictures from my hands shaking out of cold.

I am pretty pleased of the results even though there is yet again room for improvement.