Ronnie and I had a most pleasant 4th of July evening at Angels Stadium in Anaheim, watching our beloved Angels come from two runs down in the ninth inning to tie it on a Josh Hamilton home run to deep, dead center (I was wearing the “shark” rally hat, much to the delight of several fans sitting nearby, so I’ll take a bit of the credit) and then win it on a two-out, walk-off single by Eric Aybar.
The game started with the unfurling of a gargantuan US flag covering most of the Anaheim Stadium outfield, as well as a flyby. Since all US military flybys have been cancelled due to sequestration, the Angels are using the Condor Squadron out of Van Nuys, a group of WWII vintage T-6 “Texan” trainers. Bravo to the Angels for this!!
Just prior to this, as we were getting some dinner, another ethical dilemma was posed while in the process of being a good Samaritan. A group of four people, probably tourists, asked me to take a picture of them posing with the field and stadium and mountains behind them. No problem! I love taking pictures for strangers!
But as I started to take their picture and the tourists were focused on me, I could clearly see the stadium churro vendor who had sidled up next to them and had taken a classic photobombing pose. He probably does this all the time and the face he was making was hilarious! But these folks might not agree, so should I zoom in and crop him out of the photo, or include him and possibly “ruin” their photo?
My solution was to shoot two pictures, one with, one without. Not exactly the wisdom of King Solomon, but it was good enough for the moment.
I have to wonder what I would do if I only had the chance to take one picture. I’m leaning toward deliberately including the photobomber in the photo. The reasoning is that I can think of almost nothing that I’ve ever done that I regret doing, but can think of many things that I’ve had the opportunity to do and backed away from and now regret not doing. As Heinlein said, “Yield to temptation, it may not pass your way again.”
Following the game we had a fantastic fireworks display and our seats were perfect for viewing it. I had brought in a small tripod and set it up with the video camera (we were in the front row of our section) and I think that the video may be the best fireworks video I’ve ever gotten.
As for the still photos, I had wanted to try setting some of the camera setting manually, similarly to how I’ve manually shot some of my simple astrophotography, but it was obvious from the start that I was doing it wrong and things weren’t going to work. So I quickly switched back to my usual setup for fireworks with manual focus but automatic shutter and iris control using the “panorama” setting.
The other problem (as you can see below) is that there was very little wind, so the smoke from the fireworks did not drift away and just got worse as the show went on. This means that any longer exposures ended up lighting up the smoke like the high beams on your car light up fog.
Regardless, it was a great show to see in person and I hope that these pictures give you a little bit of the flavor for it!
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 