Jul
5
2005
happy fourth
Time with Friends + Nice Weather + Limited Crowds = Recipe for a Good Forth of July.
Rob, Dari and I spent a leisurely evening in Arlington for the Fourth of July, meeting at Kabob Bazaar for dinner, then taking our time walking from Clarendon to the Key Bridge (with a brief detour to the Barnes and Noble, where I picked up two books by Laurie Notaro and the amusingly titled travel novel "The Sex Lives of Cannibals"). We arrived at the bridge about 20 minutes before the fireworks were to begin and had no trouble finding a space with a clear line of sight to the Washington Monument and the fireworks show to come.
We followed the fireworks show up with a pseudo-Bataan Death March up Lee Highway and the Custis Trail to the 7-Eleven. (Humidity and hill-wise, it was worse than the time, a couple years ago, that we wandered from Foggy Bottom to eastern Dupont Circle — and came across an actual street named Bataan — in search of a gay bar that we knew offered yummy half-price hamburgers on Tuesdays. Sadly, the bar was closed when we got there, more than 20 minutes later: It was election day, and everyone had taken off to vote.)
Slurpees in hand, we walked over to Dari’s nearby apartment, where we waited out the post-fireworks traffic jams by watching a few episodes of NewsRadio on DVD. In all, a good night.
On a side note, when will I learn that 6.4x digital zoom is an evil thing, and I really should just turn off the digital zoom feature altogether? Yes, I got nice, close-up photos of the fireworks, but for the most part they were completely unuseable, hopelessly blurry and/or artifacted to death.
My goal for next year: Photograph the fireworks with a better camera. I haven’t a clue what that camera will be. But my little PowerShot just isn’t suited for this kind of shooting.
Sub-goal: Learn how to take good nighttime digital photos.
![[Photo]](http://photos.morethanthis.net/images/2008-09-13/thumbs/IMG_0272.jpg)
Comments
Most consumer cameras these days have “scene settings” which do a pretty good job in different situations. The settings usually include: landscape, portrait, still life, etc.. These also usually have “candle” (for birthdays) or “fireworks” mode that will capture fireworks very well. Nikon has the fireworks mode, sony has the birthday/candle mode and can’t remember what canon has.
I think that mine only has landscape, regular and macro modes. I’ve had it for two years, and during that time, the only thing I’ve learned about nighttime/low-light shooint is that I need to keep the camera very. still. in order to get a clear photo. (And that, additionally, photos I take using digital zoom are unusable probably 75 percent of the time.)
Maybe I should actually read the instruction manual one of these days. ;)