1) Why did you use the remote then? Were you a long way from the camera?

2) If you're worried about camera shake, just stop down some and compensate with longer shutter speed. That way camera shake will become irrelevant. With the immediacy of digital cameras, you can experiment with which shutter speeds give the best shot in terms of how many fireworks you get in the exposure. When you compensate, remember reciprocity law failure means that a simple doubling of exposure time no longer compensates for one stop down when you are shooting longer than 1 second. I think it is approximately exponential.

3) Huh?

4) Yeah, got it-not! But thanks for the techno tip anyway.

5) I'm with you, Nancy & Dannie. Too techno-babble for this photographer. All I can say is, I like Steve's efforts...even if he thought they were less than he wanted. :)

6) Point, shoot and pray is the extent of my photography skills. Oh, and delete. I use that button a lot.

7) LOL...me too, Leslie, but I'm learning a little and keep experimenting. The great thing about digitals--you can make a lot of mistakes and waste no film or expense other than your time trying. :)

8) Using a remote served two purposes: One, some exposures were over ten seconds long, I went to see a fireworks show - and not through the viewfinder of a camera!! Two - generally at a fireworks show they all explode in about the same area of the sky. If you preset your camera at that location you don't have to constantly bring it back to your eye to find the target. You need to remember, I am not a photographer, I was there to see a fireworks show, I could have cared less about the reciprocity law crap. With the described method I was able to sit in my lawn chair, watch and enjoy the fireworks, and photograph it with my thumb.

9) Actually, you've got a point: It probably is crap now as I think it only applies to film. I'm afraid I still can't get my mind out of film mode :-/

10) When I was doing astronomical research we used special 400 ISO film on a camera attached to a telescope to take long exposures of various stars. The light was first passed through a spectrograph and then collected on film. The spectrograph arranges the starlight into its various wavelenths which gave us knowledge of what elements made up the star. Even though we supercooled the whole set up with dry ice (to eliminate noise) we still were hampered by the reciprocity factor of the film. The manufacturers of the film gave us very good graphs related to reciprocity at the specific wavelengths of light we were gathering. Later on we purchased a CCD for the telescope which gave us the ability to gather more light in a shorter period of time. Then we went to digital cameras and computers and the amount of data we collected grew astronomically (pun intended).

11) Cool! There's some pretty incredible technology going on there.