Home Eagles! Wolf at the Door? Thunderbird Creek! Coyotes & Mountains Peters Creek Chugach Mountains Eklutna Lake

It was a quiet evening at Thunderbird Falls. A gentle snow was falling and it was very quiet, very peaceful. Houses up and down the road were all decked out in Christmas lights. It was beautiful. But, it was not Christmas! It was a week past! It was New Years Eve!

Ever since I can remember, I have shot off some fireworks right at midnight on New Years Eve. Even back in California, where it was technically illegal, we had a lot of fireworks on New Years Eve, but nothing like New Years in Alaska!

Much like the 4th in the Lower 48, fireworks here were not limited to just a brief period. Folks started setting them off at 8pm and continued until late into the night. They even continued for several days after. The fireworks in Tom's neighborhood were not the small garden variety, but Class B -- the big stuff. It was all set off right in front of Tom's house. Tom even helped light the mortars.

I have taken photographs of fireworks before, years ago with film, but I have never taken any with digital cameras. However, the principle is much the same. You simply have a camera on a tripod and expose the image for several seconds.

The problem with digital, is that after about 5-10 seconds, you start creating a lot of noise in the image. This is just a product of the CCD and is not avoidable. So, I decided on exposures of 4 seconds. You also do not have the lens all the way open. When photographing bright things like fireworks, you put the camera on manual and set the aperture to about f8 or 9 for an ISO of 100. If the fireworks are very bright, or you are photographing something like a finale, then I'd recommend stopping down another stop or two. I knew that fireworks tend to have a very yellow cast to them, so I manually set the camera's color balance to incandescent light and that produced near perfect color.

I had two cameras set up, a Canon 1D with a 28-70mm f2.8 lens set on 4 sec at f13 and an ISO of 200. This camera magnifies the image 1.3x because of the slightly smaller ccd chip. I of course had the lens at the widest aperture, but that amounted to about 36mm. Considering that I just about directly below the bigger exploding shells, that camera was producing fairly close-up images. If you look at the file number, the ones beginning with D8DD are taken with that camera.

My other camera, my Canon 1Ds has an 11 mega pixel chip and it is exactly the same size as film so there is no change in effective focal length of a lens. I used my 16-35mm f2.8 canon lens on that one set at 16mm. That was so wide, that I ended up getting part of the roof of the house in some of the shots. However, those images were easily cropped a bit so you are just getting fireworks in most of the images. The exposure with this camera was 4 sec f9 and ISO of 100. Those images start with C24S in case you are interested...

Both cameras were pretty much pointed straight up. It was snowing slightly so I had to clean the snow of the lens almost with each shot. However you can see large blobs in many of the images. That is actually snow on the lens which has been illuminated by the exploding shells.

I also had a technical problem which would have been disastrous with any other photography requiring a tripod. I do not yet have 'cable releases' for my cameras. My digital cameras require special electronic cable release timers which are essentially remote controls. They are expensive and they are not generally carried in a camera store. When I get back home, I need to special order some. I was also using very cheap tripods which were not very stable. I have since purchased a nice Bogen 3033 to use up here, but for this night I just had these two small tripods. This left me with the only option of pressing the shutter button on the camera. When I have done this before, I have set the camera to a self timer and so there is a 2-10 second delay, depending on how I have the camera set, before the shutter is released. This is useful if taking photos of a landscape, or a sleeping wolf, but not of rapid-fire activity like fireworks. So, I decided to just risk some jiggling and took pictures without concern for the camera moving a bit. The fireworks were also constantly being set off, so what I did is I would just keep pressing one camera then the other as each was taking its 4 second exposure. The end result was quite good. In photos where the shell exploded a second or two after I took the photo, the image is steady. But, in photos where the shell was exploding while I pressed the shutter, I ended up with a very pleasing and unexpected surprise. Since the light from the shell is basically a bunch of sparks, point light sources in effect, the sway of the jostled camera created a wavy effect to the photo. I found that really produced some great effects. So, in the photos where the lines of light have a sine wave pattern to them, that is simply the camera swaying back and fourth after I pressed the shutter. Really cool, I think. It was also really nice to have all the trees! You do not usually see fireworks being shot like this among so many trees!

Because I took so many photos, and because I could not decide which photos to put up on this page, I made extra small thumbnail images so just like any other page you can press on a photo you like, just it is more important on this page because some of the bigger ones are really worth looking at. In fact, right now they comprise the screen saver on my notebook!

The aftermath was a lot of empty shells. Pretty amazing how much came from such small tubes!