Post-PAEMST Wednesday: Air & Space and Fireworks

Jean was stay close to the Beacon and visit the National Geographic Museum and give her legs a rest this day. So I headed out alone. The streets up at Dupont Circle were dead on this holiday morning.

Our little sidewalk cafe was open, so I had a bite of breakfast before heading to the Metro and on to the Smithsonian stop. I headed directly to the Air & Space Museum, so I could be there when it opened.

The marching bands were readying for the parade. They were decked out in thick felt and heavy boots. And decorative hats. They were dressed for winter, but it was heading toward 90+° F. And the humidity! I hope they managed to keep hydrated and were prepared to burn those unis.

I got into the museum with a sizable crowd. I knew it would only get more crowded as the holiday went on. I meandered and photographed as best I could.

When lunch rolled around, I asked a docent for a tip. He recommended the food court next door, the one at The Museum of the American Indian. Good call! It wasn't cheap, but no museum food court food is. But it was arranged by various Native American regions. The variety was excellent, and the fare was yum! It's called Mitsitam. I wandered through the expansive gift shop and found a few T-shirts. There were other alluring treasures, but the new camera (and lenses) set me back a bit.

I returned to Air & Space for more meandering and photography. So much aerospace goodness in that place! I was happy to see some recognition of the Ranger and Surveyor missions to the Moon: the unmanned probes we sent in the run up to Apollo. Of course I spent time in the Wright Flyer gallery, enjoyed a show at the planetarium, touched the Moon Rock, and wandered through several other robust displays.

I found an appealing T in the basement of the museum store, where there was also a giant model of NCC-1701.

I returned to the Beacon to strategize and gear up for the evening's fireworks display. I surmized the rockets were to be launched somewhere over The National Mall. I had been told that that place tended to be extremely crowded during the show. No interest at all. It looked like I'd have a good shot if I crossed the Potomac and shot from the Mount Vernon Trail near the Arlington Metro stop.

When I arrived (hours before sundown), the west bank of the Potomac was tripod-to-tripod thick with photogs already in place. I found a breach and plugged my Gitzo in. The view included the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, with the boat-laden Potomac in the foreground. All that was left was waiting for dark.

The show started around 9:15pm, I think. Once it began, there were "bombs bursting in air" non-stop for about 20 minutes. My rig was the Nikon D800E + Nikkor AFS 24-70mm. I set it fairly wide (I didn't have a sense of how high the bursts would go), knowing that with 36 MP, I could crop as needed. I'd read somewhere that f/11 and ISO200 were good settings for fireworks, so I went with that. The shutter was in bulb mode, and I had a cable release.

I've never really shot fireworks, so the proper technique is not intuitive to me. You want to be able to expose for several seconds while not losing color saturation. I was also in Live View, which was probably a mistake. I kept the camera/lens an autofocus; most shots were spot on, others were a touch soft. With more confidence and better technique, I would have set the focus to the one that works and locked it in. But when the show is on, it's a race to gather as many images as you can. All I wanted to think about was when to open and close the shutter.

When it was over, it was back to the Metro. But the crowds that had taken hours to assemble were now in a hurry to depart at the same time. And there was a failure somewhere near Arlington. So the steaming masses were forced to wait. As 11pm approached, it was still hot and very humid.

I was pleasantly surprised by how well most of the fireworks shots turned out. I was shooting something I don't shoot on a camera that was unfamiliar to me.

So closed the last full day in The District.