Fireworks

Every summer, the casino at Lac Leamy in Gatineau holds a fireworks competition. Over two weekends in August, teams from different countries put together an incredible pyrotechnic display over the Lake. Thousands of people pay twenty dollars or more to be admitted to the casino grounds to view the display - but hundreds more park their cars along the Ontario bank of the Ottawa river, whip out their deckchairs, and view it all for free. I took this photo (and a few more like it) with a crowd of other photographers (and others) camping out on the footbridge over the Rideau Falls. We had a perfect view over the river to the fireworks, the wind was from the east blowing all the smoke away, leaving excellent conditions for photographing the display. I set the shutter to remote manual release, aperture at f/14, and timed exposures of three to five seconds for each explosion.

I was distracted by a woman next to me, brandishing a DSLR, taking reams of photos, all handheld using the onboard flash. In the end I told her that none of them would come out, and would she please stop, the flash was interfering with everyone else's pictures. She didn't seem to get it - "if I don't use the flash it's all blurry," she told me. D'oh! Why do people bother spending large amounts of money on an expensive piece of kit without doing some basic research into how it functions? We've all seen people with cheap compacts taking flash photos of the moon, that's one thing, but leaping about with an expensive camera like David Bailey in front of a supermodel when you're taking flash photos of a fireworks display a couple of kilometres away is really, well, daft.

Details: Nikon D70, 18-70mm lens @ 70mm, f/14, 4 seconds, ISO 200. 30 July 2005, Ottawa. Placemark.