Each year for the past 8 years or so the Lake Dallas Parks and Special Events departments puts on a 4th of July fireworks show. For a small community, it’s an admirable display that brings out  a number of Lake Cities folks. For 30 minutes, everyone seems to sit back and enjoy the show, and each other…with little regard for miserable humidity and mosquitoes. The beer-influenced social skills of the patrons oddly turn polite (for the most part) once the show starts, but before and after…well that storytelling would require a koozie holder for another lawn chair in the Bubba truck.

This year I tried something new. I studied up all of 1 hour the day of…and took pictures of the show. I set my tripod-mounted Canon on the hood of my truck, using the time delay shutter release (no gotty a remote). While the Canon tried to do its thing, I hand-held my FugiFilm camera braced against the roof of my truck and just started taking random pictures. The Fugi pictures turned out…the Canon pics were overexposed. Flickr has more of the evening’s shots – these two I like so far.

You see as any good camera man knows, and will tell ya: a “best vantage spot” needs to be scoped out before the show, not at dark-thirty at the “best available parking spot”. Somebody went a put 4 power lines across my vantage point, thus giving black streaks to several of the Flickr shots (I curse them guys).

At least I’m starting to learn CorelDraw in “fixing” my powerline-in-the-way mistakes. You have to look pretty darn close to see where the powerlines were in these two photos….

tm