Fireworks

I stared at the hopelessly underexposed photo. I hadn’t purposely underexposed it, and I have to admit that I’m puzzled as to how I could have messed up the settings so completely. I was also on a “Delete” roll, trying to winnow down my photo library. I have almost 8,000 photos, many of which are duplicates, or lots of different experiments with the same subject because I’m not yet experienced enough that I get that one good photo  with only a handful of shots. I can probably easily delete at least 2,000 of the photos, if not more. That’s too much to do at once, however, so I try to go through about 50-100 of them each day, slowly working my way through.

So I was on a roll, just pressing “delete, delete, delete” over and over again when I came to this photo. My finger was all ready to tap down one more time when I found myself wondering if I could do some experimenting on this one using exposure, light, color, etc. It was a completely unusable photograph as it was, so I figured that nothing that I did could ruin it any further. That’s when I started to play. How might I be able to achieve some truly unusual effects? Effects that I wouldn’t have had the courage to experiment with if I had been happy with the photograph in its original form.

I spent a throughly delightful half hour and came up with this. Here in the States we celebrate our independence on July 4th. And here is my photographic version of fireworks. If you celebrate it, Happy 4th of July Everyone!! And if you don’t, I hope enjoy the show just for the fun of it.