I’ve never been very successful photographing fireworks. Over exposed, under exposed, blurry, whatever the reason, all my firework photos ended up on the digital cutting-room floor. This summer’s 4th of July fireworks in Pentwater Michigan offered a chance at redemption. With a tripod and a remote trigger, I managed to create a couple keepers mixed in with a few of outtakes.

Pentwater is a small Lake Michigan community and their 4th of July fireworks show is equally as small. At any one time there were no more than two or three mortars bursting in the sky except for the finale. A longer exposure was needed to capture the lower light and also had the benefit of picking up the quickly diminishing sunset. Pentwater is far enough north that a completely pitch black sky would have meant a fireworks show not starting until well after 11:00pm.

Starting with a 5 second exposure, I worked my way up to a more optimal 30 seconds. With a Nikon D70s, a 30 second exposure took sixty to ninety seconds for in-camera processing of the RAW image file, so there wasn’t much time to analyze and adjust. The entire fireworks show was only twenty minutes long.

The only thing I wish I would have tried was zooming all the way out and capturing a broader portrait image.

Click on any image for a larger view and go to Flickr the entire series.

Word around the hanger today is that the Eclipse 500 was certified for Flight Into Known Icing (FIKI), something Eclipse Aviation has been promising for several years. (Read the Aero-News Network article here). The entire production cycle of the Eclipse 500 hasn’t been an easy one, from a slow delivery schedule to a recent price increase.

However, Eclipse Aviation has just recently started taking orders on their new, and smaller, Eclipse 400. The 400 made a surprise appearance at Oshkosh last summer as a concept jet. You have to think that all the lessons learned with 500 will improve production of the 400.

Pretty dang cool looking, if you ask me. (More photos here).

I have to say I was a little more then jazzed to read that photo storage/sharing/printing/safe-keeping site SmugMug has created a new service call SmugVault.

SmugVault is a service that allows you to upload any type of file or document (RAW, PSD, Excel and/or Word) in addition to the current unlimited free uploading/storage of JPGs, PNGs and/or GIFs. Pricing for these new file types is 22 cents per gig per month with a $1 per month recurring charge. Data transfer in is 30 cents per gig. Data transfer out is 51 cents per gig. Like the rest of SmugMug, this service is built on top of Amazon’s S3 Web Service.

The announced came today on SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill’s blog (http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/).

At those prices my 40 gigs of most important RAW images (mostly pics of my feet while sitting on the sofa and my dog) will cost less then $10.00 per month to store with around $12.00 charge for uploading. For an additional $20.00 I can download the entire load…which I hope I’ll ever have a need.

Currently, I export every photo from Lightroom as a JPG and upload to SmugMug, but now I can send along the original RAW image files and sleep a little easier knowing they’re in good hands.