I learned a major lesson this fourth: it's much easier to get more creative when the fireworks are far away. On the 2nd there was a show a few miles from my house that I watched from the backyard. Using the 100-400 lens at 400mm, I was able to get some nice shots and be creative because the sparks appear to move slower at that distance.
But I couldn't enter that shot (I wonder if Langdon realizes that most fireworks displays don't happen on the fourth).
So on the night of the fourth, we found this small town display, and I setup. I didn't expect the fireworks to explode overhead! They were so close that the sparks moved incredibly fast, and made it difficult to do creative things with composition, zoom blur, and focus changes.
But I still got some interesting shots. This is one I was hoping to catch something like, where the explosion starts in focus and gradually becomes bokeh-ized. Sure, it's no landscape shot over the water, but I didn't have that opportunity, so I worked with what I had :)
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Cool. I think you did a great job conceptually, but you killed this with processing - the edges of the bursts look like you've used 'wet edges' with the paintbrush tool to create them.
Really too bad, because I think the yellow/red/white burst is just astonishingly beautiful.
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