Celebration

It was an enjoyable day of smiles, noise, marching, flags, family, and cheers as we celebrated the Fourth of July in Idaho Falls. The fireworks, reflected in the Snake River, were great as always!

A note about technique - A common mistake people make in photographing fireworks is to over expose the image thus robbing the fireworks of their color. The individual points of light from the fireworks are very bright so for this image I used ISO 200 and f22 to bring out the color and keep them from "blowing out." To capture enough ambient light the exposure was stretched to 15 seconds.

This logic is very similar to flash photography where you would use your ISO and aperture to correctly expose the flash. Shutter speed, which does not affect the light from the flash, is used to control the ambient light.