Llandudno Fireworks 2007

Last night was, of course, November 5th, and as such the 2007 Llandudno Fireworks were on in celebration of Guy Fawkes night. Last year I missed the fun and excitement of Llandudno because I was over at Bangor with Heather and Ben, intending to take a look at Bangor’s fun and excitement with a bit of beer and some excellent company. Being somewhat disorganised however we missed the Bangor fireworks, excepting for a few brief flashes seen by dangling out of the bathroom window. This year I couldn’t make it to Bangor and so decided to go and enjoy the fireworks here in Llandudno.

I left it a touch late for the photography I wanted, but still enjoyed the show. The idea had been to get on the top of the Orme and take some shots, hopefully with the reflections in the sea. I hadn’t realised how early they were starting (and the interwebs were no help at all) so in the end I only made it up to the Camera Obscura next to the cable-cars and set up shop there. It was, frankly, beautiful. Too dim for the camera’s to pick up sadly, but it was a clear night with only one or two clouds in the sky, the stars were out and very bright, and the side of the Orme was covered in little dots of light (people camped out) that twinkled and shone and looked for all the world as though some of those stars had fallen out of the sky and landed on the hills. It looked amazing.

The other thing I had not counted on was the immense wind. I put up my tripod and the thing blew over before I could put the camera on it. I was not expecting to get any decent shots in conditions like that. I also hadn’t counted on it being so damned cold, I could barely move my fingers after ten minutes standing there, so I just set up the camera on manual, stuck the kit lens as wide as it would go so as to maximise chances of catching something, set it at ISO200 with a 4sec exposure and left it at that the entire time. By the end of the 20min show I was shaking so badly from cold that I was making the tripod less steady rather than more steady by putting my weight on it. That’ll teach me to wear my gloves and a decent jumper.

These are the only shots I managed to get that were not horribly blurred, though even these are noticible once you get to slightly higher resolutions. I also took a video of the whole event. I’ve had to compress it quite harshly to get it down to 150Mb (it’s 1.5Gb in full quality), and the auto focus got it slightly wrong in the dark, but it’s close enough.