Happy New Year!

It was a quiet passage into 2013 at our house this year.  We enjoyed the Redwood Meadows community fireworks (thank you to the team that put on the show – it was fantastic!) at 8 and then celebrated New Year’s with the East Coast of North America so that our kids could take part.  At four and six years old, staying up until midnight in our own time zone seemed unlikely.  We said goodbye to 2012 and wished each other and our family the very best in the new year.  I would like to extend the same warm wishes to you and yours.  Happy New Year!

For those interested, both of these photographs were taken with the camera on tripod using mirror lock up with the lens focused to infinity (works well with smaller apertures).  When the firework missile streaked skyward, I triggered the shutter and used longer exposures to capture the explosion and the cascading streaks that followed.  For the first image, I had the camera set on manual with a shutter speed of 13 seconds at f/11 on ISO 500 while the second image was 8 seconds at f/11 on ISO 800.  As always, you can click on each image to open a page with a higher resolution version.