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View Full Version : My July 4th Experience



FBpyro
07-07-2021, 10:24 AM
Hello all, I'd like to share my holiday weekend experience with everyone. This was my first year having a huge amount of site space to work with as my sister and brother-in-law recently purchased a new home attached to 30 acres of land! To my surprise upon arriving at their place, my brother-in-law already had mowed a small circle of grass for me to set up everything in. I did have two Winda Sunshine States that I wanted to place 100ft apart but wasn't quite able to do that due to not having enough flat surface to put them on and also the grass just got taller the further out of the designated spot you went. Was able to get everything staked down successfully and wired up to my custom-made firing system.

My one major concern upon figuring out the site layout was that my wireless firing system didn't have the range I needed to reach all the way out to the hillside 1000ft away, so before I got carried away and poked and wired all my stuff, I decided just to do a quick test and wire up a single canister shell to shoot off and it worked! I can't tell you how satisfying the feeling of shooting something off remotely from a huge distance is.

Attached are some photos of the setup and the show, unfortunately, wasn't able to get much video because I was intending to get really good long exposures of everything, but between struggling with adjusting the camera focus properly and getting the settings dialed in, I only managed to take a few crappy photos.

Interestingly I had one minor mishap and fortunately, no one was injured nor equipment damaged. My plan was to hand-fire about a dozen or so shells to get rid of some and then go back to the house and shoot my automatic show from there. I had two salute shells for my finale pre-wired and ready to be loaded into the mortars when I was done hand firing, what did I forget to do? load them into the mortars lol. As soon as I hit cue on my remote and saw the lift charge flash I immediately knew what had happened. The scary thing is that only one of the salutes fired and when I went to inspect the damage at the site before continuing the show, I couldn't find the other one anywhere! my guess is since they were both sitting right next to each other on the ground that they both blew up.

http://www.pyrotalk.com/bulletin/attachment.php?attachmentid=5854&stc=1http://www.pyrotalk.com/bulletin/attachment.php?attachmentid=5856&stc=1http://www.pyrotalk.com/bulletin/attachment.php?attachmentid=5858&stc=1http://www.pyrotalk.com/bulletin/attachment.php?attachmentid=5859&stc=1http://www.pyrotalk.com/bulletin/attachment.php?attachmentid=5860&stc=1http://www.pyrotalk.com/bulletin/attachment.php?attachmentid=5861&stc=1

Mattp
07-07-2021, 10:57 AM
Love those long exposure shots!! That type of land is every Pyros dream … with 1000ft of distance … you could do ground shells on purpose and not have to worry.. lol!! Glad it went well for you

Engineer Cat
07-07-2021, 03:39 PM
Those long exposure shots I been seeing people do are really cool.

A neighbor did a time lapse of my short 4 min show but it looks pretty cool. I like these funky ways of taking pictures and videos. Unfortunately because it's a time lapse I can't slow it down and it's the best camera location. I'll be putting a camera in that spot next year.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwfHW_iWVsE

FBpyro
07-08-2021, 03:57 PM
Love those long exposure shots!! That type of land is every Pyros dream … with 1000ft of distance … you could do ground shells on purpose and not have to worry.. lol!! Glad it went well for you

Thank you Mattp! Unfortunately, I was way off in my guestimate and measure on google maps I learned the distance between my shoot site and spectator location was only 350ish feet lol. Although their 30-acre lot does go back at least 1800ft from the front of the property so if I did ever want to step up my game and go into 1.3 stuff it's nice to know I have the room to do so.

FBpyro
07-08-2021, 03:58 PM
Those long exposure shots I been seeing people do are really cool.

A neighbor did a time lapse of my short 4 min show but it looks pretty cool. I like these funky ways of taking pictures and videos. Unfortunately because it's a time lapse I can't slow it down and it's the best camera location. I'll be putting a camera in that spot next year.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwfHW_iWVsE

I always enjoy seeing fireworks time-lapses and just timelapse in general. I recently got a Wyze security camera that allows you to record timelapse straight from the app and it's been pretty fun playing around with.