You Do The Best You Can

Sometimes, as an amateur photographer, you find yourself in a situation to shoot some photos, but real life interferes with following “best practices”. Last week was one of those occasions. While at Disney with my wife’s family, especially our 6 year old niece, we decided to stay out at night and catch the fireworks at Magic Kingdom.

Now, under normal circumstances, you’d want a tripod when shooting fireworks, especially fireworks being shot behind and above a fixed object like Cinderella’s Castle the way that the are at the Magic Kingdom. On the other hand, who wants to carry around a tripod in the park all day? And forget about finding a place to setup a full tripod, or even a small tripod, in that crowd. It just isn’t really feasible. So you wind up shooting a bunch of stuff, using a bunch of different settings, and hope that a few turn out half way decent so you can have a nice photo memory of being at Disney.

That’s the nice thing about digital photography. In situations like this, you really can experiment with a number of different settings, and see what turns out best, and you’re really only out the space the photos take on the memory card temporarily. Then, once you have access to a PC monitor, you can delete all of the failed experiments and no one even has to know about those….

Unless you blog about them, of course. 😉

So, what suggestions do you have for those of us who find ourselves in these situations?

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