Night Fire

This photo is one of the replica Japanese aircraft that takes part in the Confederate Air Force “Tora, Tora, Tora” Pearl Harbor reenactments. It appears that one of the planes parked next to it has caught fire, and that this plane is just about to go up, too. In reality, this is fireworks that was shot off at the conclusion of the night flight part of the High On Kalamazoo airshow.

Normally, I shoot with my camera in all-automatic mode since it is quite a bit smarter than I am. The only thing I commonly diddle with is doing my own focusing. In this case, the camera would have seen the bright flames, and not opened long enough to see the airplane in front. I put the camera in Aperture Priority mode, and tried bracketing 3 different shutter speeds. Due to the high contrast, all three speeds turned out about the same.