A quick post with some pictures because I have to be up at the crack of dawn to steer dragonboats tomorrow morning.

Day 4 of Les Grands Feux du Casino Lac-Leamy saw the team from Sugyp SA representing Switzerland. The weather wasn’t the nicest, but people still came out and the rain held off until after things wrapped up. I enjoyed the show and it’s thrown some uncertainty in my mind as to who will be awarded the Zeus Trophy Saturday evening. (I have my prediction, but I’m going to refrain from saying anything here since I am one of the volunteer photographers at the festival.) 😉

Pictures after the break. (more…)

The team from Grupo Luso Pirotecnia were on stage representing Portugal at Les Grands Feux du Casino Lac-Leamy Saturday evening. From a photography point of view, things went much better: it wasn’t raining, the correct lens was on my camera, and the remote shutter release didn’t jam. The theme was songs from the eighties with a sound track that appealed to a lot of people in the crowd, judging by what I could hear.

Because it wasn’t raining and the smoke wasn’t hanging around, I ended up with a number of photos that you can see after the break. 🙂

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I wrote about the trials and tribulations (and an unexpected surprise) of photographing the fireworks this past Wednesday at Day 2 of Les Grands Feux du Casino Lac-Leamy in last previous entry, so I’m going to simply post some photos after the break.

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This past Wednesday, I shot photos at Les Grands Feux du Casino Lac-Leamy where the team from Garden City Display Fireworks in Beamsville was representing Canada. From my perspective as a photographer, if it could have gone wrong, it did: It started to rain just as I and the other photographers were getting ready to set up, so we sought shelter under a tent. This meant that we were rushed in getting to our shooting location and were scrambling to get things set up in time. I took a photo to check the framing, which is when I realized that I had the wrong lens on my camera. Normally, I use a 10-20mm wide-angle zoom to give me the widest field of view possible, but I had my 18-200mm zoom on it. Those 8mm make a significant difference in the field of view.

I started shooting photos and made adjustments to the camera to make the best of things. I resigned myself to the fact that some of the effects would be cropped by the smaller field of view.

Over the last few years, I’ve taken hundreds and hundreds of photos of fireworks. Most of them turned out quite well, and I’ve posted the highlights on my blog. In all the years I’ve been taking fireworks photos, I don’t think I’ve ever taken one that has made my jaw drop because of how it turned out.

Until now.

When I did my first cursory review of the photos in Lightroom, I almost rejected it. But when I took a second look, I was stunned by what I’d managed to capture.

I think I’m going to call it Spark Dancers.

Now with a YouTube video at the bottom.

This past Saturday was the first evening of the 2014 edition of Les Grands Feux du Casino Lac-Leamy and the team from Glorious Entertainment Production Limited represented Hong Kong. They put together a great show with some impressive shells that were coordinated with a fun selection of music from various Broadway shows. The festival is at a new site this year on the Ottawa River at the Museum of History.

The new location offers them an impressive backdrop consisting of Parliament Hill and the Ottawa Locks on the Rideau Canal. Though they aren’t using it this year, if they can secure permission to place fireworks on the Alexandra Bridge, we could see fireworks displays in the national capital region moving to the next level.

I took a lot of photos of the show, which you can see below. The biggest challenge in terms of shooting them was the smoke. It hung around rather than blowing away, which meant that some of the shells were buried in the smoke. Still, it was a good show! 🙂 (more…)