Photographing Johnstown, PA

Twilight time at Peoples Natural Gas Park in downtown Johnstown.  The venue is home to the Flood City Music Festival every year and concert nights right through the summer

Apartment building along Market Street in Johnstown.

Painting on the pillars holding up Route 56 as it passes through the city.

Another painted pillar.

Styrofoam head with headband.

Wall art at Park Place between Main and Lincoln.

More of the wall art at Park Place.

Patina covered gas meters on the wall of a parking garage at Market and Lincoln.  I just happened to see this out of the corner of my eye as we drove by.

Ethnic Arts Center aka The Bottle Works on the corner of 3rd Avenue and Chestnut Street in the Cambria City area.

Dead tree on the flood wall along the Conemaugh River in Cambria City.

Clock tower, Johnstown City Hall.

Reflection of clock tower in a window on Market Street.

Johnstown Inclined Plane, steepest vehicular incline plane in the world

This star sits on a long metal building housing JWF Industries between the railroad tracks just behind the Peoples Gas Park.

Patina door handle on an old, boarded up garage on Garden Alley by the train station.

Church steeple on Chestnut Street between 7th and 8th Avenue that I shot for one of the Facebook photo sites (Verdigris) to which I belong.

Biker on McCoula Street

Bull thistle.

Fireworks 101

This week's blog was shot in Patton, Pennsylvania during the Fourth of July 2014 Weekend.  A lot of people think that taking pictures of fireworks is something that they would never be able to capture.  But it is really not all that hard.  Besides your camera you'll need a few other pieces of equipment to make the shooting successful.

• A wide angle lens the standard 18 to 55 is good 
• you'll also need a tripod and a cable release.  

The info that I am sharing today is strictly about how I got the results that you see here.  To find out how to setup your camera other than the settings that I've used you can find a lot of good instructional videos on YouTube.  Because I wanted to have more control over what I would see at the end of the night I used the following settings.

• I first set my lens to the widest view (28 mm) because I was using a 28 to 70 Canon lens. 
• I set the dial mode to B (bulb) and my ISO to 125 
• The shutter aperture was set to f/9.   

Most of my exposures started as soon as I heard the sound of the shell taking off from the ground and I held the remote shutter release button down for between 1 and 4 seconds depending upon what I seeing in the sky.  If possible you should get to the display area a little early so that you can get an idea of where the fireworks are going to be exploding in the air.  If not, just take your time, look through the viewfinder to get the first ones set up and after that you are fine.

l