Fireworks night (a view from inside)

We didn’t bother trying to get out for fireworks night this year.

But we have a good view across Hillsborough. So we turned off the lights and sat watching out of the window.

Before we did this I faffed about setting up the camera on a tripod with a programmable shutter release (less fancy than it sounds), to take 979 photos, each with a 10 second exposure. That, I hoped, would be long enough to capture whole firework trails.

Then we play the waiting game.

I waited until they were all taken, without much opportunity to check whether the effect is coming out right since touching the camera would nudge the tripod and it wouldn’t be consistent and stable for the whole thing.

Then I combined all the photos (using a simple ‘screen’ blend in Sketch) to put all the bright bits together and avoid the dark background getting brightened. I did it in about half-hour batches of a couple of hundred frames each. Then I pushed those composites into a free online gif-maker.

The camera never lies?

No, the camera always lies.

In this case, it never looked even close to being as dramatic as how it appears here… though it was still brilliant.

(Click the picture above if you want to see it bigger.)