Sunday, July 10, 2011

I Love Fireworks

We went with Beth and Tim to the lakefront to see Milwaukee's fireworks last Sunday evening.  The family Tim lived with for a while goes every year.  They get there early, set up tents, bring the grill and lots of food, and spend the day.  We'd never gone before.  We didn't spend the day, just went in the evening - still with plenty of time to hang out before it was time for the fireworks.

The fireworks were awesome!  They shoot them off from three different barges out in the water, and they have something, usually several, continuously in the air for a whole hour.  I didn't get nearly all of it, but I just couldn't resist taking some video with my cell phone.  I would have used my other camera, but the battery decided to die.  Also, I really should have played with the camera settings on the phone, because the video is really small, I can only shoot 30 seconds of video at a time, and there was no sound.  Sound would  have been nice because we were hearing not just the fireworks, but the echos off the buildings behind us.  But, I used Windows Live Movie Maker to put the videos together and added some music, and they're still fun to watch, because they're fireworks, and I love fireworks.




After copying the video from my phone and playing with it last night, I adjusted the settings on my phone.  Why I didn't think of that before, I don't know.  I knew how to change from camera to camcorder, but I had never looked beyond that to realize there are lots of other settings I can play with.  The settings were optimized for sending from my phone and sharing on other phones, which I guess makes sense, but I don't really do a lot of that.  I'd rather have better quality videos - maybe they'll even go longer than 30 seconds at a time and have sound.  I haven't tried it yet, but we'll see.