GEAR TALK - Reunion Tower 2023 New Years Fireworks

To celebrate the New Year, Reunion Tower held a fireworks show at midnight. The show was a mix of the tower's LED lights, around 200 drones with LED lights and the fireworks. We saw the show in 2019, but this time was different with the drones. Also, the neighboring buildings shutdown their LED lights, so Reunion Tower had center-stage so to speak. The show was only 10 minutes. Below is a video from local our local Channel 4 Fox TV station.

Had I known drones would be part of the show, there were better vantage points. Framing for both the fireworks and drones would have been aesthetically awkward. The drones were forming weird emoji's, which had little or nothing to do with a "New Years" theme.

With all traffic, it seemed like a million people were there, yet I was pretty much alone at my usual spot. There was a group of 7-8 people about 50 feet away. Turned out they were event staff, recording their show. I could hear their cameras firing shots every second. Their cameras were set to interval mode. The crew essentially sat back and let the cameras click away.

That was a curious exposure setting as fireworks generally need a 4-second exposure. One second exposures leave little time for the firework trails to "develop" or "blossom". I like to shoot around 4 seconds and adjust the aperture as needed.

The Leica M11 handled itself well except for a bug with the interval shooting mode and electronic shutter. Simply put, the camera never stops firing off exposures. The only way to stop the camera was to turn it off. Interval shooting mode works fine when the Leica M11 is in mechanical shutter mode, just not the electronic shutter mode.

Fortunately I discovered the issue beforehand, so no harm done. Other than that, the Leica M11 did fine. It was ~100 continuous captures over a 10 minute period with the Leica 90mm F2 Summicron-M APO - my goto lens for taking pictures of Dallas from the Trinity River flood banks.

🧨🧨🧨 Happy New Year! 🧨🧨🧨