Monday, September 3, 2007

Boomsday - The Biggest Fireworks Display in the USA!

This may be little ol' Knoxville's biggest claim to fame other than the UT Vols football team. Boomsday is a $1 million dollar pyrotechnical display of nearly astrological quality. This teaser image is just one the images I culled out from my Labor Day weekend shoot along with a few scenes from the 1982 World's Fair Park as well.

Attached Image

See the full Boomsday 2007 slide show!

Shot with 18-70 ED and 70-300 ED Nikkors on a D200, I positioned myself within 100 feet of the launch zone - it was a humbling experience. The sheer noise level was incredible. This year they abandoned a popular musical choreography approach and simply barraged us with an endless stream of launches that produced some amazing light and pattern combinations. I shot the entire fusillade nonstop and culled what is presented in the slide show.

Instead of using the traditional Bulb method of opening the shutter, waiting for something interesting to happen and shutting it down manually, I used 1/20-1/60th shutter speeds at a 1250 ISO. This technique more sharply captured the ambient light and action surrounding the launches explosions and seemed to add another dimension to the images.

Much credit goes to Adobe Lightroom for an expeditious review, pick, edit, and conversion of the images into the Flash web gallery. This program is phenomenal for cranking out photo presentations lickety-split and has revolutionized my postprocessing workflow.

Mule

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