For the last few years, we have gone to the Richmond Crane Pavilion on July 3 for their “early July 4th” fireworks. Various music groups play for a couple hours, then the Oakland Symphony plays for an hour leading up to the fireworks, following with more music while the sky lights up.  The area is extremely windy, which means the weather is usually clear, and the smoke never lingers over the fireworks target area. The celebration is not well advertised, and the crowds are pretty small, with (my guess) a thousand or so people, so it is always easy to get front row seating.

I decided to try some “artsy” photos this year.  The top image shows three of the fireworks, composited onto the San Francisco Legion of Honor.  While the fireworks in Richmond are great to view, there is no usable foreground to make the photographs more interesting, so I have to fake it…

A straight example of what I was experimenting with this year — no editing done at all, other than cropping the final image.

We sat on our deck and sipped wine while watching the fireworks tonight (the actual 4th). We could see lots of fireworks shows from our vantage point. Legal shows were seen at (right-to-left from our field of view) Golden Gate Fields, Berkeley Marina, Sausalito, Emeryville, San Francisco (Wow!), Oakland and San Leandro.  We could also see more than a dozen illegal fireworks in the Oakland-Berkeley neighborhoods below us.  When we turned on the 11:00 News later, they showed a camera pointed to the Oakland Hills, and commented on the numerous illegal fireworks shows going on there.  As we were turning off the news, we heard that there is a fire in the Oakland Hills.  We assume it was related to one of those illegal shows, which is the very reason they are illegal…

Here are some fireworks from last year’s Crane Pavilion, shot with a more standard photographic technique: