Fireworks over Bournemouth Pier!

Friday 8th August

The last day of my week-long bus ticket

...and I JUST had to use it the one last time...

The forecasters hadn't forecast rain. I was dressed in only shorts and shirt. But had tripod and rucksack of lenses. Hmmm.

Getting into Bournemouth at 4.30 and it teems down with rain. Escape into Wetherspoons for their Friday fish and chips. Emerge an hour later and it's still peeing down. Escape into a coffee shop before it closes. That took me to 7.30. It was still of a precipituous nature...

The idea was to capture fireworks over Bournemouth Pier. The council put on a display on some Fridays during August for the holiday-makers. Very nice. They also advertise fire-eating and street parades. Hmm, none of that going on. Had they cancelled the whole thing, due to 'inclement' weather?

The tripod tied me down and so street shots were out. Not that anybody was out on the streets! far too early for the Friday night revellers and everybody else was (sensibly) hiding.

I got damp. Quite damp. The camera also, but I didn't notice that, as I was wet! (Yeah, work that logic out...)

I tried to get shots from under the Pier with the tripod, but still got wet. Everywhere was wet, even when in the dry. Darkness fell. Still no activity. A whole hour of waiting around for the display, due at 10pm. The bars and pubs a fair distance from the beach and all with bouncers outside and even Wetherspoons at 5pm was heaving (I had "reserved" my table by placing big tripod bag right across it, whilst ordering my food).

So, I stuck it out. It wasn't exactly cold, not that it was warm, either. Five minutes to ten I came out of the shadows and set up the tripod on the beach. It still rained.

By this time, the poor camera had gone into a slight coma. None of the menus would come up and you couldn't look at any of the images. So you had absolutely no idea whether your exposures were correct, or not. Guesstimates are one thing but literally shooting blind is another!

Not too shabby in LARGE

Anyway, the plucky little Nikon kept getting my 6 second bursts of fireworks. I had it on manual and could change basic shutter speeds, apertures etc but nothing much else. I couldn't even see any of the images until I finally got home well after midnight when I put the SD card into the PC....

I knew that it would recover, sooner or later, as exactly the same happened during the finale of Salisbury Arts Festival in which I got a really memorable Blip without actually seeing the shots at the time!

The Nikon seems to protect itself by shutting down some functions whilst still performing its basic task - to take the pictures. I admire this and is what an amateur camera aspiring to be a pro camera should do, let you get the image, the one "in the bag".

Lens is Tamron SP 17-50mm f2.8

Silica gel placed in the mirror box of the camera did aid its recovery but took nearly 24 hours to do so. I shall endeavour to treat it with more respect, in future....

Just as I do, for myself. Hmm Hmm! Like the walking back eight miles to get yesterday's Blip. HUGE thanks to ALL for getting that to top of the Spotlights all night long and much of the morning too.