Sorry I'm so late putting this up but I've had problems with my ADSL connection this evening as a result of having some defective cabling somewhere behind the mess that's my desk. Anyway, it's sorted now so here's what's technically yesterday's entry. This was taken at the Festival of Light fireworks display on Sunday evening. This was the second display in two days to celebrate the turning on of Blackpool's illuminations.
As for this shot, I can't say that I'm particularly pleased with it, not least because it's a hybrid of two shots taken a few seconds apart. Though I took about 55 shots, I wasn't really happy with any of them and guess that I need a bit more practice with fireworks. All the shots were taken at f/11 and ranged from one to four, maybe five seconds, and the difficulty I had was knowing how much to allow on each frame before closing the shutter. In quite a lot of the shots the exposure was a bit too long which lead to quite a lot of blown out areas, while in others it was too short. This one, or these ones, are probably a little too minimal – and I really should have used portrait rather than landscape format – but I'm reasonably happy with the result even if it isn't a straight shot. Oh, and in case you were wondering what was wrong with the two original shots: the burst at the top of the shot that accompanies the bottom half of this one was rather too small for the shot (about two thirds the size of this one but much the same other than that), and the fireworks at the bottom of the other shot appeared to be overly erratic and were slightly burnt out.
Anyway, call me a Photoshop cheat, but I prefer this to either of the originals. And if you think about it, a four second exposure isn't entirely 'natural' anyway so, especially since I confessed, I'm not too bothered about amalgamating the two. And just so there's no confusion, I've added a new category – digital art – that I'll use for any shots that are photoshopped beyond simply adjusting a pre-existing shot.
