pictures of the day: jul 4

The plan was to go to this new spot that my brother had gone to last year to see fireworks. It was a trail up on a hill overlooking parts of the bay (or the sloughs?). We luckily found parking not too far from the start of the trail (which may have been a signal to us that the viewing wouldn't be as nice as what we did last year), and made the trek up the stairs to the top of the hill (OMG, stairs... 😮‍💨).

We got there as the sun was starting to set, so I got a lot of good pictures of that.

Here is today's contribution to the Shitty Camera Challenge, day 4.

The rest of the photos I took were with my Ricoh GXR and the Leica M-mount lens module, with my Nikon 28-105mm f3.5-4.5 lens. I was going to bring along my Pentax Q10 also, since a) it has a 5.5x crop, so even a moderate focal length would be telephoto/telescopic, and b) that's what I used for last year's fireworks. But I stupidly forgot to charge its battery (was too concerned with the GXR's battery). 🤦‍♀️

Anyway, as we waited for it to get dark enough for fireworks, I took a ton of sunset photos.

I played around with framing behind some weeds/tall grass:

And more as the sun kept getting lower:

It was getting pretty cold and a bit blustery. And we realized (at least for the time we were there) that the fireworks views were too far for our preferences. My lens wasn't long enough to get a good view.

Nothing like the zoomed in abstract photos I like to get. 😒 Because I thought this was the best I'd get, and it was really cold, we decided to leave a bit before 9:30 (we'd gotten there about an hour before?). On our way home, we detoured to pass Great America and saw that their fireworks were just beginning, but we had nowhere nearby to park, so we just made our way home. But because we saw more large fireworks in view as we drove home, we decided to detour towards a nearby park. No parking around, either, so we ended up driving home anyway and walking back out towards the park. The view was blocked by tall trees all the way out there, but eventually I caught a few between the trees, towards either Great America or some unauthorized fireworks:

We continued walking into the park to catch a glimpse of the other unauthorized fireworks going off sporadically. For a bit I just watched the fireworks, but when I saw they were going to keep coming, that's when I busted out the camera to try catch a few more.

Sadly, not as many cool captures as last year, but it was nice to get out and explore all the same.