Day 3 of Les Grands Feux du Casino du Lac-Leamy took place this past Saturday and I was there taking photos. Having covered many of the “things” at the festival on Day 1, I decided to concentrate on the performers on the various stages and, of course, the fireworks. Oh hey, remember the undersea diver and mermaid act that I posted a couple of pictures of in my post about Day 1? Well, they were still there and I took this photo when the undersea diver was peering into my camera:

Nah, not creepy at all.

The team from Pyro Spectaculars represented the United States with a show featuring music by The Beatles. Here are a few photos from their show. Like Day 1, the wind wasn’t cooperating at some points meaning there was a fair bit of smoke between the fireworks and the crowd, as you can see in some of the photos. Still, the show was pretty impressive and the crowd seemed to enjoy it.

If you’re interested in how to take photographs of fireworks, you might want to check out an entry I wrote last year on the subject.

Saturday evening I went to Les Grands Feux du Casino du Lac-Leamy as one of the volunteer photographers for the event. It’s the first time that I’ve been an “official” photographer for something since my days of being a photographer for the yearbook in high school.

Being the first day of the festival, the team of photographers were asked to fan out and take pictures of everything from the signs to the tents to the chairs and also the people. And, of course, raison d’être for the event, the fireworks.

I’ve written about taking photos of fireworks a couple of times in the past and I’ve even taken pictures at Les Grands Feux, though not as an official event photographer.

There are a couple of different approaches I use when taking pictures of fireworks, which depend on the type of camera I have and whether I can use a tripod.

As I was fortunate enough to have an unobstructed front row seat, I set up my camera on a tripod and framed the scene prior to the beginning of the show. I focused on the barge where the fireworks are set off from and then turned off the autofocus on the lens so that it wouldn’t "hunt" for something to focus on when the fireworks started. Shooting in raw mode, I chose an ISO speed of 100. This would allow longer exposures while avoiding saturating the CCD sensor. For a shutter speed, I selected "bulb", which means that the shutter would be open for as long as I held it open with my remote. (Fortunately, I didn’t have to actually hold it open because I was using a wireless remote — I just had to press the button to open the shutter and press it again to close it.)

And then I waited for the start of the show.

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Kathy and I went to Les Grands Feux du Casino du Lac-Leamy this evening. The assigned seating was sold out so we bought a couple of general admission tickets and eventually found somewhere to set up our chairs. The fireworks were quite impressive, but the sound system, at least where we were, was less than perfect. Because of the size of the site, they were using an FM-radio-based system to extend their sound system. There was interference on our speakers for most of the show. But that didn’t interfere with the whole experience very much.

Tonight’s team was from South Africa. They have won the top award for the show a couple of times in the past and stand a very good chance of winning it again this year.

The first piece of music was the Star Trek: Next Generation theme. Very impressive when set to fireworks. There were some which looked like rockets being launched into orbit, which drew a big response from the crowd. These particular fireworks rose very slowly compared to most fireworks and had a streaming trail like the exhaust from a rocket.

The display ended with dozens of “flash bangs” which lit up the site as though it were high noon. Very cool!