The bombs bursting in air. . .

Well I am a little late on this update, but its here nonetheless. I have finally uploaded some shots from my 4th of July photo shoot. You can find them under the "Events" gallery. I went to the firework show in Tallahassee, FL this year. It was a pretty good show overall, and I had a great time capturing it.

This was my first real attempt at Firework photography, and it definitely was not perfect. I used a similar technique that I have been using to shoot lightning lately. The whole shoot was done in bulb shutter mode, so that I could control the shutter manually. Everything was shot off of a tripod and using a cable release shutter control. I stuck with a wide angle lens as well. The hardest challenge I think is to try and capture the full explosion of the shells, while keeping it all in a crisp clear focus. I was using shutter's of over 5 seconds at times. I kept my ISO around 400, and aperture's around F8.0 seemed to yield the best results. I hope you enjoy my first attempt at this venue. I will try again hopefully on New Years.

As I mentioned in a previous blog, I am planning a trip to the Florida Keys in August. I am hoping to do a lot of shooting on this trip, and will likely have a very large update to my galleries when I return. We have a lot of fun things on the agenda for the week I will be down there, but at the top of that list of course for me is the photographic opportunities. It will be my first trip to the keys, so I'm looking forward to it.

I made a few small changes, as promised, to how the website looks a few weeks ago. Hopefully everyone will find the new look to be an improvement. I will always look for new ways to improve my website, and am always tweaking little things behind the scenes. I still get questions on when or if I ever plan to offer my work for sale or prints, and the answer to this question is still yes. My original goal has not changed in this regard. Its more a thing of priorities right now. The printing equipment I am looking at is quite expensive, and I am also looking at upgrades to my camera equipment. I definitely plan to have this all up and running fairly soon however. By the end of the year I should have all this done, and be ready to really push my photography to the next level.

I havent mentioned this until now, but I do have a personal myspace that is mostly used for my photography. I would invite you to check me out there, and even add me as a friend if you'd like: www.myspace.com/timthigpen. Until next time!