Purple Smoke from Firework Rockets

One of the most exciting and enjoyable things for me to photograph is fireworks. It is hard to find decent events, where it is easy to set up a tripod for photography, but at the Blackpool International Firework Competition this wasn’t much of a problem. This is one of the few photos taken last September where the smoke is more important to the image than the rockets themselves. Most firework photographs are taken with a long exposure of five or more seconds. This image was an experiment where I tried a fifteenth of a second exposure time. This is why there is so much detail in the smoke. I chose to crop out the bottom part of the image showing the dark area underneath North Pier (where the fireworks where being launched from) because it didn’t add very much to the image. To me it is the purple and red smoke that really caught my eye.