The Rockets’ Red Glare: Some 4th Fireworks

We decided to do something little different this year, and instead of going all the way to the show at Niagara Falls, or partaking in any of the local shows, all of which we’ve been to dozens of times, we decided to stop over to a little burg just to the west of here called Lyndonville.

They had advertised a good show, and we decided to take a chance.  As it turned out, we were not disappointed.

We managed by way of some good “lay of the land ” pre investigation, to get an extraordinarily good spot for the show.  So, I set up the chairs in front of the truck and we sent back to watch.

As we settled in, we began to notice some of the families around this, one in particular that was parked right front of us, had a fairly young boy with them.

Both of mine, have grown beyond this stage, but I was taken with the image presented me, and snapped a few pictures.  This one here, is the best of a lot. Not bad, for a night shot, really, and I offered his dad copies of the pictures I took.  He was taken with the offer, and readily accepted.  I find that kind of thing to be a nice icebreaker.

To be honest, I think what captured my attention was how much what I saw in my viewfinder looked like what I’ve been seeing in my rearview mirror for 45 years or so, now. As Meatloaf sings: “if life is just a highway, and the soul is just a car, then objects in the review mirror may appear closer than they are.”

(Sigh)

As is usual with this kind of show, there’s always the amateurs that show up with their imported fireworks… by that I mean stuff brought up from shops in Pennsylvania and other places where fireworks are not controlled as they are in New York.  New York, in fact, has even outlawed the sparkler that the young subject is holding, here.  It interests me, and encourages me, actually, that te residents of the Nanny state take such a serious dump on such nonsense every year.  There are laws that have purpose.  Drug laws for example.  But taking sparklers away from the kids?  Beyond the pale. I tried to get some snaps of some of the smaller stuff, but couldn’t… Too fast, and to transient .  Setting up a shot with this camera and this tripod in the dark, is still proving to be a bit of a challenge for me.
Perhaps ten minutes after we arrived, the actual show began.  As it happens, the dew point was extraordinarily high, the winds low, which as you may know makes for perfect fireworks weather.  This is because the smoke from the first round of fireworks stands to hang in the year quite a while, giving a background to the second, and so on.  The result is a multilayered effect, that is really quite striking when it works right.  On this occasion, it did.  If you look closely and the following pictures, you will notice the smoke hanging in the shape of the fireworks that made it. you will notice it more in the movie link at the bottom of the page, then you will in the stills, I’m afraid.  Here’s the better stills, taken early in the show. You can drill on them to get the full res shot. These are 1600 by 1200 shots, which with JPG compression end up between 60k and 1 meg, depending. Night shots are like that, with compression.

I did manage to grab some low Res movies of the finale. one This file is about 10MB, and is in AVI format,

It should work in any browser. If not, right click it, and save the file to your hard drive, and then use Windows Media player to open it.

It’s a little boxy at full screen… sorry, I don’t have that kinda money to spend on bandwidth.

We’re going to another show tonight, over at Fair Haven, NY, which is up along the southeastern shore of Lake Ontario. With luck, I’ll have a few more shots to show you.