The Edinburgh Hogmanay fireworks display at the Castle, shot from Ferry Road, through the railings of the Goldenacre playing fields.
Camera on a tripod, lens at 145 mm. I set it in portrait mode, anticipating lots of high flying shell-bursts. Aperture set to f8. Remote release cord used in ‘Bulb’ mode, to give a variety of exposure lengths – very much trial and error. The first issue was that the fireworks were very densely packed, so any kind of long exposure length just filled the frame with light in no time at all, and it all got very messy very quickly. I was intending trying up to 8 second exposures, but ended up with every keeper between 0.9 sec and 3.7 sec. The other issue was that, while the sky cleared away nicely for the event, there was a stiff breeze blowing. While that did help blow the smoke away between bursts, I am sure the shells were intended to go higher – it all seemed a bit squat compared to what I remember seeing in the past. There was no time to mess about, changing to landscape orientation – and if I had done, what’s the bets I would have missed some high shell-bursts? So, I ended up with a dose of portrait shots with masses of black dead space in the top third. So, I have cropped it out and gone for square format for most, with the odd sneaky landscape done by heavy cropping.