People Mountain People Sea

As enjoyable as the fireworks shoot yesterday was, the overall event itself was at moments exasperating, and at all times sweaty.

I started looking through good sites for the NDP fireworks shoot a fortnight ago. The open field at Raffles Quay was of course the favorite among enthusiasts. The spot is possibly the best place to shoot fireworks with the Suntec City and Esplanade area in the backdrop. Ironically, this field wasn’t my first choice initially, since every other photographer would be zeroing in one that area. There were other spots including the Merlion Park, Tanjong Rhu, and Marina East.

Eventually, I decided on the Raffles Quay field just beside NTUC centre. Our small group friend Ann was going to do the same event too and I was hopeful we’d be able to do the shoot together. This sort of thing is a social thing and best done in groups. She chose the Merlion Park though, which was about perhaps 500metres away on my left of where we were. Her experience of the shoot turned out quite different which you can read about here. Still, it was a comical sort of scene as we were SMSing each other during the setup and parade and comparing notes.:)

Either way, I figured we’ll have to get to the field early to get a good spot and thought that 4 pm would be early enough. As it turned out, at 3:45 pm all the best spots had been taken. Part of the field had already been cordoned off which left perhaps an approximately 30 metre stretch that would allow perhaps two dozen photographers an unobstructed view of the bay. I had to settle for a second row, and it was about then that I wished the 190CXPRO3 tripod could extend a little taller so it could overlook people’s heads.

The fireworks event was drawing photographer enthusiasts from every range and ability, from persons with handphone cameras, to compact cameras, to prouser digicams, to professional-class DSLRs. DSLR users were largely from the Canon, Sony and Nikon families, though as far as I could tell there was only one other person using a D300 besides myself. Also, Benro is clearly a very popular tripod brand because there were more Benro tripod users than the Manfrottos and Gitzo users added together.

By 5 pm the place was packed with standing room only, and strangely not just by photography enthusiasts and Singaporean families, but a lot of foreign national construction workers. As our friend Ann also remarked in her blog entry, it started to feel as though we were indeed in a foreign country!

Then it started drizzling. We were prepared enough for that thankfully, with plastic bags to cover the tripod ball head, umbrellas, sheets to cover the camera and tripod bags etc. The tripod, all our barang barang, Ling and I shared and huddled under our umbrella. She thought the whole experience was very ‘lomantik‘. :)

The fireworks started promptly at 8 pm and that was when the shutters started firing. The persons who’d done their homework were all using remote triggers while others were using timer modes.

A technical note here; most fireworks sites advise keeping the shutter open for 6 to 10 seconds but I found the best results coming from 3-4 second shuttles. I didn’t employ the double exposure method to capture two fireworks bursts either. The bursts were running in such quick succession it would have made such an exposure method pointless.

In any case, the fireworks were all done at 8:15 pm, which was at about the time I remarked to Ling about all this 4 hour trauma for just about 90 frames of pictures. Thankfully the photos turned out pretty Ok. Certainly could be better, and I have a good idea what to improve upon next time. The spot was perfect, just that it was too small to contain the crowd.

That that said, a colleague at work swears by the apartment buildings at Bras Basah for fireworks shooting and was quite dismissive of the other areas. But having seen the fireworks pictures taken yesterday with the Suntec City and NDP grandstand backdrop, it’s hard to imagine if there’re better places. Still, I think I’d go for variety next year and scout for another location. After all, who’d want fireworks pictures to look the same