everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Month: July 2022

  • Photographing Fireworks

    For the past two years I’ve had the good fortune to live right next to the largest fireworks event in North America, the Macy’s July Fourth fireworks “Spectacular” on the East River between Manhattan and Queens.

    Last year I walked out on to the FDR highway which was blocked off to traffic both North and South from 42nd street. It wasn’t too crowded (probably because of the pandemic) so I was able to find a spot over-looking the river a few blocks north of the UN. I only had my iPhone with me but was still able to get some good shots as well as video.

    This year they only blocked the freeway South from 42nd so it was too crowded to stroll on to the highway so I decided to try my luck with an DSLR and take some photos instead. I have never been able to get decent photos of fireworks so I read up on it beforehand and found this helpful guide that was written specifically for Canon cameras (mine is a Rebel 5Ti) which was quite helpful.

    I used an 18-55 mm lens at around a 10-second shutter speed with a 2-second delay after pressing the shutter button. A tripod is key and you’ll need to practice timing when to press the shutter in order to get the full “starburst” effect. I also set the lens aperture to between f/10 to f/16 so the brightness of multiple bursts didn’t wash out the exposure.

    • Tripod
    • 18 – 55 mm lens
    • Long shutter speed, at least 5 seconds
    • Set aperture to f/10 or above
    • Photos best early in the show, less smoke

    Also, your best shots will be early in the show when the sky is still clear. Later on in the show it’ll be too smoky to get decent clarity on the burst trails.

    It should go without saying to take as many photos as you can. These are just a subset of the 100+ that I took. As with all my photography experiments, it’s a numbers game. Out of many, you get a few that turn out decent enough to share.

  • The week that was

    The week that was

    Billie Joe Armstrong, frontman for Green Day, announced he’s giving up his US citizenship in response to the latest Supreme Court rulings. ‘F**k America. I’m f***ing renouncing my citizenship. I’m f**king coming here,’ he told a London stadium crowd.

    Costco recalled 400,000 solar beach umbrellas right before the July 4th weekend because of their tendency to go up in flames.

    Two employees at an Atlanta Circle K were shot, one fatally, by a dissatisfied customer. Police officers said that this was a case of someone with a gun who didn’t know how to resolve conflict without resorting to violence. This was a dispute about the amount of mayo on his sandwich.

    Employees at the New Jersey dining extravaganza, Medieval Times, have filed paperwork to unionize. “The knights, squires, show cast and stablehands of Lyndhurst will vote July 15 on whether or not to unionize.“

    With costs on the rise, some couples are looking for alternative ways to enhance their weddings for the guests.

    In the fall of 2018, a Long Island lawyer named Charles Gucciardo sought to invest $500,000 in Fraud Guarantee, Lev Parnas’s fraud protection venture. This week federal prosecutors determined Fraud Guarantee was, fraudulent. As a colleague pointed out, “It’s right there in the name!”

    In China, state surveillance has reached new levels of invasiveness. In the United States, social scientists are using publicly available data to predict crime before it happens.

    A researcher asked an artificial intelligence algorithm to write a scientific paper about itself and tried to get it published, then wrote about it.

    In a burst of honesty, the 51-year old CEO of the $68 billion Jupiter fund announced that he’s stepping down to “go sit at the beach and do nothing”