Well the 4th is over. I hope you all had a great Independence Day and I hope that you took my fireworks photography advise and put it to practice to get some killer photos. This year, John,Vasant, and I set up camp on the Charles River directly across from the launch barges, and we arrived ten hours before the start of the show. To my amazement although the temps were in the upper 80s and lower 90s with a nice sea breeze it wasn’t that bad out at all. I shot with the Canon 5D mark II with Canon EF 24-70 as my A camera and my Canon 30D with my ol’ buddy the Canon EF 15mm fisheye as B camera. I also gave myself more of a challenge by leaving in 4 stops of gel ND filter in the fisheye.
Things were going perfectly until later in the day the MIT sailing boathouse decided to moar all of their sailboats directly in front of us. The line of 20ish photographers was not pleased and they really could of cared less when we tried asking if there was another spot they could have put the boats. To make it even more of a challenge, it seemed that every time I recomposed my cameras they either added more boats or moved them around.
At the end of the day it was a successful shoot, some of the photos have the boats nicely composed and some have only masts in the lower third which is what I was trying to avoid, but you can’t win them all. We are lucky here in Boston, we have a HUGE display every year and the show is almost on top of the crowd something that you rarely see. Lots of places around the country have very small shows, or no shows because of budget cuts so getting to hang out with a million plus people for a day every year is always a fun time. In addition to the slideshow above I will be uploading these photos to my flickr account to be sure to check them out there individually by clicking on flickr in the navigation bar.
