Hi Janet!
I have gotten a little more than half way through this trip report and I just wanted to say... You are amazing! Katie is a very lucky little girl! I have a six month old baby girl and your posts give me inspiration to sew and that is saying a lot considering I am seriously bad at it. Ha!
I guess what I'm trying to say is that you can truly see the labor of love and the fun you two have together! Bravo!!!
Heather
Many thanks Heather! I appreciate the kind comments.
Enjoy that baby girl, and do get sewing. If you're serious, you should start hanging out here:
http://www.disboards.com/showthread.php?t=2707487
There are lots of people there who just started as adults, as well as those who have been sewing their entire life. But there's tons of inspiration and support. It's a great group!
HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY!!!!
Thanks! I hope everyone had a great 4th of July!
Very early planning stages, if we go at all. $$$ seem to be flying out the window lately with kids teeth, home stuff, and bills. If we do go it would be a labor day weekend thing. Moderate hotel (say around $100), we have five in our family, and would want to see Mt. Rushmore and Black Hills. What else would you suggest? Probably drive up on a friday afternoon/eve, see Mt. R on a Sat and then its all up in the air.
Well since you are on a budget I might suggest Staying at the
Mt. Rushmore KOA; they have a cabin that sleeps 6 people. There is no bathroom attached but it does have showers and such nearby, plus the place has tons of fun things for the kids to do and you are literally right next door to Mt Rushmore and very close to Hill City and Keystone. Besides that I would suggest a tour at
Jewel Cave, second longest cave in the world and then spend the rest of the day driving through
Custer State Park, maybe even have lunch at the historic State Game Lodge, while in the park you will want to take your time and do the wildlife loop, then drive needles Highway and Iron Mountain Rd. Also depending on how you are arriving to the hills you could visit
Badlands National Park on the drive in or out as well.
If the KOA idea sounds to rustic let me know and I can suggest another place, though with it being Labor Day it might be hard to find lodging.
You two go ahead and talk amongst yourselves..............
I have to say I agree about spending time in Custer State Park. We really enjoyed driving the Needles Highway, the wildlife loop and Iron Mountain Road. And we also did the Badlands on our way out. It didn't take all that long. Part of the reason we got behind schedule was the dense fog that greeted us when we arrived. We had to move really slow at first in hopes it would burn off. (Thankfully it did).
Janet, I have some fireowrks shooting questions.
I tried to play around with shooting some at my moms 4th of July party...which was on the 3rd.
Whats a good time? I think some I did 1.3 secs and some for 2 or more. But those seemed to be not as nice. Also, I couldn't use auto focus because it couldn't focus on anything when I was trying to set it up. So I just kind of set it at focus in manual and would just hit the button. I guess these were things I never thought about before. I just knew I needed a tripod and a longer shutter speed, but never thought about the exact logistics.
I haven't loaded them to the computer yet. There is one that looks pretty decent. I did have the problem of being too close too. I kept moving back, but I think the fireworks were following me. LOL! I know next time I will use a different lens so I can capture more in the frame...another thing I didn't think about. I had the other lens with me, but it was in the house and I didn't want to miss anything either.
I am seriously thinking of setting up my tripod on the beach at Poly and trying my hand at some from there.
So you were shooting backyard fireworks? That's probably a little more challenging than what I did last night, which was to shoot the big local display or something at Disney. Why? Because those displays are farther away from you and tend to be a pretty predictable distance away.
Here's what I did last night:
1) ISO 100
2) Aperture at f11 (if I recall. As MIke says anything f/8-f/16 should be good).
3) Focust set to infinity (since everything is so far away)
4) Tripod with remote shutter release
5) Shutter speed set to Bulb.
The other thing you can do is to set your focus on one burst, then set your camera to manual at that spot, then shoot away. I say it's harder for a backyard display, because everything is closer and tends to be set off at a greater variety of distances from you.
I don't have great advice on the timing except to say I use a lot of trial and error. I think most of my Disney stuff is 4-7 seconds. Most of my stuff last night was more like 20 to 30 seconds. Mostly this is because at Disney I don't want to overexpose the castle, and alas, last night's display didn't include any castles.
I do set my camera to live view when shooting fireworks so I can keep an eye on my framing and such. And I also take a quick peek at the screen after each shot just to get a feel for how the exposure is going.
This was posted on the disney blog on taking fireworks.
Step 4 -- Use the manual controls on your camera, set the ISO between 100 & 250, the shutter speed ½ to 4 seconds and the f/stop between f/8 to f/16. You can adjust the exposure as you see the results on the back of the camera.
Thanks Mike! Did you try shooting any fireworks last night? Mine are downloading now so hopefully I can post a few later today. I attended the display here in Independence.
not that I harbor any ill feelings about that 
to my trip report! Many thanks for the kind words. I was going to reply to your visitor message, but can't seem to find it back to do so. Thanks for sharing your own experience. All I can say is...... wow. Not the same, but certainly evoked the same feelings I had.
