Sunday, September 13, 2009

Riverfire 2009

To celebrate the opening of the annual Brisbane Festival each September, Brisbane is treated to "Riverfire", a half hour of pyrotechnics stretching for a couple of kilometres along the river from the Story Bridge (above) to Victoria Bridge. According to the paper yesterday, they were expecting 600,000 people to be turning up to see the display which included the F1-11 "dump and burn". Dump and burn, you ask? Lovers of the environment look away now. They do this low flyover with the F1-11 jet and, as the jet reaches the city, the pilot dumps fuel out of the back of the plane so that it catches on fire, giving the overall effect of a rocket blasting across the sky... with bone shaking, face melting sound. It really is spectacular and everyone gets very excited. A local radio station does a live cross into the cockpit of the jet and just before the pilot dumps his fuel he says "BRISBANE LOOK UP". Unfortunately, I missed getting a photo of that. I think I was too busy staring, mouth agape.

Being someone who has friends in high places, (well... the 16th floor) I was able to get a pretty good view!

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Cracker of a shot!!

BlossomFlowerGirl said...

Looks like a waterfall underneath the blue. It's very well taken Gorgeous colour blue.

Elcmae said...

Breath taking fireworks - Super shot.

Spicy Sharon said...

I was there too, awesome stuff =)

DelBoy said...

What a great photo! Well captured!

Leif Hagen said...

FANTASTIC photo of the fireworks! How did you do that? Tripod? Other secrets?! Super snap!

cara said...

Leif - This is my first time taking SLR pics of fireworks so I did a bit of research on the internet and followed these very simple steps: use a tripod and with a remote cable or the camera's self timer (I used the self timer). Choose a low ISO number, manual focus, manual mode f8-16 depending on where you are and the shutter speed I guess is up to you. This one went for 6 seconds. The blue fireworks came up towards the end of the exposure. The downside to this type of photography is that once the shutter closes (at least on my Nikon D40 camera) it takes another 8-10 seconds of processing before it will allow you to take another picture... so if you see something amazing straight after you've taken a picture, you have to sit there frustrated waiting for the bloody camera to get a move on! I could have done with 2 cameras but I suppose that's just greedy.

Terri said...

Wonderful photograph, and worth the sacrifice of another maybe-good one to get a really great one like this. I snapped dozens on Saturday night, and none even come close to this so kudos, yours was well worth the effort and patience :-)

Paddy said...

That is absolutley incredible. Thanks for that!

SjW said...

Very nice - I like how the fireworks look like giant neon flowers, and the waterfall looks amazing. Wish I had been there for it!

Splendid Little Stars said...

stunning!

Elisha said...

Absolutely spectacular!!! Another reason I miss Brisbane. Well done!

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