Posts Tagged “Fireworks”
Kitimat had a spectacular display of fireworks Monday night, March 18, 2019 to mark the opening of the Junior All Native Basketball tournament, hosted by the Haisla Nation.

The winning float in the 2015 Kitimat Canada parade from the Community Supper Club. (Robin Rowland)
Staff Sergeant Phil Harrison who is retiring from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police leads the Canada Day parade. (Robin Rowland)
Kitimat Fire and Rescue. (Robin Rowland)
Kitimat Marine Rescue Society (Royal Canadian Marine Search and Rescue SAR 63) still affectionately known as “Snowflake Responder” (Robin Rowland)
Mayor Phil Germuth. (Robin Rowland)
Rio Tinto Alcan’s Gaby Poirier leads the RTA entry in the parade. (Robin Rowland)
Kids enjoy the parade. (Robin Rowland)
The Haisla Nation Spirit of Kitlope Dancers. (Robin Rowland)
(Robin Rowland)
(Robin Rowland)
The gymnastics club. (Robin Rowland)
Handing out goodies to spectators along the parade route. (Robin Rowland)
The Canada Day cake at Riverlodge ready for cutting. (Robin Rowland)
Later on the afternoon of Canada Day, a wildfire broke out on the hydro transmission corridor near the Rio Tinto Alcan smelter. It was contained a couple of days later. (Robin Rowland)
Fireworks. (Robin Rowland)
Fireworks. (Robin Rowland)
Photography is often affected by the weather. A change in the weather can mean as Robbie Burns wrote in 1785, “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an ‘men gang aft agley,” or to quote a more contemporary author, some guy called Murphy, “anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”
So it was on Saturday night. The main employer in Kitimat, Rio Tinto Alcan, was celebrating a company safety record for the year 2010 and, to include the community, sponsored a fireworks display at the local Riverlodge Community Centre.
It was unlikely that any of my regular clients would want the photos of a corporate event, late on the Pacific coast, with the NHL playoffs and the election taking up most of the feeds and play in the Canadian media. (I did check, they said no.).
So that gave me a chance to try an experiment. Rather than going down to Riverlodge and try to find a good location, I decided to shoot from a park just down from my house, a park with a great view of the mountains. Saturday was clear all day and with a near-full moon coming up in the east at about the time of the fireworks and some fresh spring snow on the peaks, I figured there would be just enough moonlight to illuminate the white snow on the mountain peaks that would be behind the fireworks.
The fireworks were scheduled for 10 PM PT. Wouldn’t you know, about eight o’clock, the clouds began to move in. By the time of the last twilight at ninish, you could see that the peaks were socked in.
I went to the park and got set up. As it got closer to 10, the moon was a barely visible white blob behind heavy clouds, the peaks to the west were invisible in the black night. Overall ground level visibility was good, you could see the lights of the Rio Tinto Alcan smelter kilometres away, but occasional whisps of mist drifted over the tops of the trees of the park.
Had one camera on a tripod, with a 170-500, aimed at the hidden snow-covered peaks (just in case the weather cleared. It didn’t.). Second was hand held, with a 70-300. Not the best situation.
You have to make the best of it.
Got home, checked the computer, threw out most of the images but then I noticed that on some photos, there were some tree tops in front of the fireworks. For some reason, I remembered the closing scene of Return of the Jedi, where the CGI fireworks over the tree tops on the forest moon of Endor celebrate the end of the evil empire. (By the way Canadians, vote on May 2 and vote for democracy).
What I love about photography is that you can always have fun while you are working, especially when things aren’t working out. Make the best shots you can under the conditions of the moment. So for this fun blog I chose images that let me imagine that it was that forest moon and that the evil empire was gone.
The end of the Death Star.
The end of the Death Star.
The celebration
The celebration.