Last summer, down near Boulder, CO, I decided to set up my tripod and experiment with a cable release and “bulb” to try to capture the local fireworks display. The results were pretty respectable, as far as the fireworks were concerned, but there was no sense of place… they could have been anywhere in the world. I was shooting towards the eastern horizon, which is flat and featureless along the Front Range.
This time around, I thought that I’d try to get a little bit more of the location. Here in Lake Stevens, there is an official, municipal fireworks display, but it is frequently overshadowed by the dozens of private displays that occur around the lake. My intention was to capture the effect of the multitude of simultaneous displays, and when I looked through my viewfinder at the darkening evening sky, I knew that a wide angle lens wasn’t going to cut it. Instead, I decided to take several shots and stitch them together to create a panorama. You can see the result at the top of the page. Even at full screen, it’s not quite big enough to get the full effect… but I’d recommend clicking on the photo anyway. The full resolution file was roughly 35 megapixels.
It’s difficult to decide how realistic this photo is. The exposures of each individual photo were about 10 seconds long, so they did capture multiple explosions in such a way that they appear contemporaneous in the final photo. Additionally, there are 4 photos stitched together, so there are about 40 seconds represented, but they’re not the same 40 seconds across the entire finished piece. So, in real life, there was no single instant in time (whatever that means) that looked like this photo. However, if I had used a wide angle lens instead, and stopped the aperture down two stops and left the shutter open for 40 seconds instead of 10, and then cropped down to this portion… you’d see this photo, plus many more fireworks that I missed in the 30 seconds that each of these areas were not exposed. I think that the duration of the exposure actually allows the camera to capture something that conveys the experience much better than a fast, motion stopping shot would have.
