Firework at Jack London Square, Oakland

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Firework at Jack London Square, Oakland
swoo
7/4/2002

Theresa and I took the public transit BART and then walked to Jack London Square ( http://www.jacklondonsquare.com/ ) with our friends John, Sylvia, and our god-daughter Natalie. We then had sushi at Yoshi ( http://www.yoshis.com/ ) and finished off the dinner with green tea ice cream with Azuri (spl?), which is sweet red bean. We waited on the boardwalk while I tried to find the perfect place for my camera. The spectacular firework started shortly after 9pm and lasted about 20 minutes. It was great. I'm looking forward to next year's firework already.

I took these pictures of firework using a Nikon Coolpix 5700.

What worked

	A tripod that allowed me to take a timed exposure.
	The fold-out 1.5" LCD monitor allowed me to place my camera mounted on a small mini-tripod on top of a garbage can. Trust me, without a U.S. warranty, I was very careful not to drop my camera into the garbage :-)
	Setting the exposure to manual at F8 and 4 seconds at ISO 100.
	Setting the focus to infinity.
	Setting the focal length to equivalent of 35mm in order to capture as much of the sky and foreground as possible, and then just cropped the images at home

What did not work

	Any exposure that is less than 4 seconds (like 2 or 1) did not capture enough firework to be interesting.
	Any exposure that's 8 seconds caused overexposure

What I'll do next time

	Stand closer in order to capture the firework that reflect from the water
	Stand further away in order to capture more interesting foreground
	Bring a full-sized tripod so I don't have to worry about dropping my camera into the garbage :-)

Most of these pictures were taken at 2560x1920 FINE, but I have cropped and down sampled with Adobe Photoshop Element. Coolpix 5700 is able to save some relevant information in a file named INFO.TXT. Here is an example

DSCN0063.JPG
CAMERA : E5700V1.0
METERING : MATRIX
MODE : M
SHUTTER : 4.00sec
APERTURE : F8.0
EXP +/- : 0.0
FOCAL LENGTH : f8.9mm(X1.0)
IMG ADJUST : AUTO
SENSITIVITY : AUTO
WHITEBAL : AUTO
SHARPNESS : AUTO
DATE : 2002.07.04 21:12
QUALITY : 2560x1920 FINE
SATURATION : 0
FOCUS AREA : CENTER