fireworks

virago lives downtown, not far from the regions bank building, site of the largest fireworks display in the state. unfortunately, her balcony faces the opposite direction, so we couldn't view the fireworks from the comfort of her apartment, but we went downstairs to her apartment complex's second-floor parking structure, where we had a pretty good view.

i wasn't the only one who thought to go there. a couple dozen other residents were there, and of course lots more were camped out on balconies. we were struck by just how many people crowded into downtown indy for the fireworks. they were camped out all along the streets. we even had to pay $5 to park, because all streetside parking downtown had been snagged up. it was worth the $5, though, because the fireworks were excellent.

i had been inspired by this post on boingboing about photographing fireworks. specifically, i was interested in the update about taking "unconventional photos". so i made sure to bring my camera, and even had to miss the first couple minutes of fireworks as i raced upstairs to the apartment for new batteries.

i took lots of pictures until my memory card was full. i didn't put a lot of time or thought into framing my shots; i just pointed at the sky and pressed the shutter a lot. i'm not nearly as good a photographer as those people, plus i was shooting between skyscrapers and a nearby tree, so most of my pictures were crap, or at best mediocre. but out of the 80 pictures i shot, i got a few that were pretty interesting, so here you go. in the first three, that L-shaped thing to the left is a string of xmas lights wrapped around the railing of a balcony on a nearby apartment building. most of the later shots were actually taken with portrait orientation, but i don't really feel like rotating them. i'll leave the rotation (90° clockwise) as an exercise for those who give a damn.
















i thought the ring effect on these last two was pretty damn cool.

update: after uploading all these photos, i came to an unpleasant realization: blogger's image upload utility automatically shrinks (and recompresses) photos it thinks are too large. of course i knew that blogger was creating smaller "thumbnail" versions to be posted in the blog, but i had simply assumed that the original, full-size photos would be untouched (even though a puzzling number is suffixed to the names of uploaded files). we all know what happens when you ass-ume. i hadn't really noticed before because whenever i'd posted important images (say, for cat bending), i had always uploaded them myself using sftp.

i had intended to post the actual, full-size images (1280x960, ~300k each), not the recompressed shrunken versions that were in the original post. so i thought about starting a flickr account and uploading a bunch of them there (including several not included here), but a free flickr account still wouldn't let you see my originals, and i'm not quite ready to pay for a flickr account yet. i might still do that, but for the time being i've uploaded all the original photos here, deleted the 1024x768 impostors, and corrected the links. sorry for any inconvenience. ¶