I braved the massive overcrowding at Old Settler’s Park to watch the fireworks. I arrived around 7:30 and parked next to the water park. Strangely enough, with people parking on every available grass location, only a few people parked in this parking lot. I sat on hole 14 and waited. As dusk approached, four parachutists landed on the stage. What that had to do with fireworks, I do not know.

The sun took its sweet time to set. I had to relax and enjoy watching kids run amok — tearing up the construction fencing and climbing up the hills of dirt for the dam. But all was not lost. I saw this police ATV run along the dam after 9 at night. Too bad I guessed wrong and poorly positioned the camera. The shutter speed was 30 seconds at this point.

The kids weren’t all bad. They did provide me with a photo opportunity. These kids, which you can’t really see (because they won’t stay in one location for 20 seconds), are at least off playing in a safe area.

The single most annoying phrase of the night was “Oh, look. Fireworks!”. No, really. Isn’t that why you came here tonight? Finally, at 9:23, the show started!

It didn’t really matter what exposure time I used. I set the camera to bulb and manually opened and closed the shutter. The tricky part is in guessing when a single firework would explode and how much of that process you wanted to capture. I kinda liked the non-visual ascents. Usually, when the shells were launched, you could see them rise on a rocket exhaust. But some of them were launched like a mortar shell. You could hear them being fired and then, some time after that, they would explode into brilliance.

The fireworks were over quickly this year. I decided to wait in my truck to see if the traffic situation would clear up. It was a solid line of parked vehicles trying to exit the premises. But after an hour of waiting, nothing changed and I decided to stop-and-inch my way out of the park. Even with both lanes rerouted one way out of the park, 79 was the bottle neck.