2008/08/27

2008 July 30 Wednesday and July 31 Thursday.


On July 31, the Hokkaido Newspaper held their annual Big Fireworks Display 花火大会 along the banks of the Ishikari River 石狩川 just below Tokiwa Park.

Charles Hamel and his oldest son came over to my place at about 18:40, and soon thereafter walked with Ikuko and I over to the same location that we went to on July 25 when we watched the Yomiuri Newspaper's Fireworks together.

This time, instead of my snapshot camera, I brought my digital video camera.

It has been a long time since I have used this rather expensive but very good DV movie camera, so I had to sit down and read the instruction book again.

I bought a new tripod because my very old one broke during the photo session on July 25.

The four of us arrived at the river bank about 10 minutes before the start of the show.

When the final salvo of fireworks was finished at about 19:50, we all walked into the downtown area where the 3・6 Downtown Merchant's Festival was in full swing.

As usual, there was a lot of interesting and amusing things to see there.

When I got home, I downloaded my fireworks video onto a special computer hard disk, and began the editing process.

I was able to come up with the best 18 minutes of the fireworks display and put it onto a customized DVD.

The quality of the video is very good on the DVD.

I will send a copy of the DVD to my sister who lives in Seattle Washington.

For most of the rest of you, I have begun uploading the movie to my YOU TUBE account which is called PrivateHokkaido.

You can see the videos from that server, by
clicking here.

The image quality of the DVD is much much better than what you can see on YouTube, but you can still get a good feeling for the excellent timing and combinations that the fireworks professionals put together, for the dazzling light show. ENJOY!!!