Fireworks In The Snow

Last night was the first time I have been to our town's Winter Festival.  Usually I'm a wimp about cold and going out at night into a blizzard seemed a little crazy but it was actually BEAUTIFUL out and I'm so glad I went!

My camera is now 3 years old and the other day while photographing my bread making adventures it slipped out of my hands and landed lens first on the floor at a bit of an angle.  My favorite lens, the 18-55mm kit that I use for EVERYTHING took the brunt of the impact and now no longer will autofocus.  It makes a sad little noise.  I am able to use it with manual focus which is a major pain in the patooty.  I do have a Quantaray 28-200mm lens that a friend was nice enough to give me a while back and its the closest thing to a wide angle lens that I have now.  It actually takes really nice sharp pictures BUT the thing that drives me nuts is the barrel (zoomer) turns in the opposite direction of all my other lenses!  This can be a real problem if you are quickly trying to zoom in on something and your brain is trained to turn it to the left, but the lens turns to the right!  Other than that, its a great lens.

We arrived at the Rec Park at 6:45pm.  My friend Becca and her two kids joined us at our house and we walked over as I live very close by.  We only had my 3 year old daughter with us and she rode in a sled.  Unfortunately when we arrived she played in the snow for about 5 minutes and then her hands got cold and she freaked out and was miserable for the rest of the time.  My friend and I walked back to my house and got her car which has a video set up inside and ended up letting Autumn sit in it the rest of the time watching Zhu Zhu Pets dvds!  Oh well!

At 8:00pm the fireworks show started.  Now, this is the night that Blizzard Nemo was to come through the state.  It had been snowing all day from a clipper system that came over us from the Great Lakes  (we live in Northwestern Vermont) and we had accumulated about 8-10" of snow from that.  It was still snowing pretty good last night, but right around 8:00 is when the winds from the Nor'easter started coming through.  I set up my tripod (a nice heavy one thank goodness) and my camera and started shooting.  I used an ISO of 100, an aperture of f/14, and a shutter speed from 10 sec to 15 sec for most of these.  Any faster of a shutter speed and I wasn't getting the dramatic look I wanted.  There were two snowmobiles parked in my foreground and multiple people standing around watching them in front of me.  I was the length of 2 soccer fields away from the source.

Here is a link to my album on SmugMug, where the quality is much better than Facebook:



The Festival continues this weekend.  If you live in the area and want to know more about the events click on this link to the facebook event page!