2021 – July 4 Local Fireworks
(ignore April 30, 2017 publish date – this was published on July 5, 2021)
For over 30 years, I was able to go on my roof via my personal roof door from a bedroom until 2 years ago when my relatively new – and out of his mind – landlord decided he didn’t like me and blocked my roof door from being able to open.
It kills me because of all the varieties of photography I was able to indulge in from there and all I can say now is that the battle isn’t over.
But it especially galls me around the 4th of July when I was able to see the pyrotechnic displays from at least a dozen surrounding towns AND the Macy’s fireworks (10-15 miles away), whether their barges were on the Hudson River or the East River (though I prefer the much-nearer Hudson).
Here’s a typical shot that I took ten years ago. I’m in Hackensack. The fireworks were in Englewood – 2 towns away!
Since this stupid ban, my fireworks photography has been severely reduced, but at least I had a shot at the Macy’s ones last night………..until the clouds and haze rolled in at dusk.
Hackensack’s fireworks got COVIDed last year and this year and that display was practically in my lap from my living room window, so that loss probably hurts the most.
Some local amateurs shot their own off last night, but the better ones were to my west, meaning I could only shoot them through a dirty window in my kitchen with my camera on a tripod that had to be in my sink!
My kitchen has old French (crank-out) windows that each have 6 segments, so I actually only have one of those little segments to shoot through, which really limited how high my frame would be, resulting in something like this:
Or something would slip in the sink during a time-exposure and……..oops!
I almost got lucky with this one:
Enough – I’ll take my chances with my east-facing living room window. Unfortunately, it seemed to be mostly occasional amateur fireworks in nearby towns with no way to time them, resulting in crappy shots like these:
TOTAL waste of time.
I was about to pack it in when I suddenly heard a bunch of little explosions VERY nearby. I looked out the window and saw what I guess were firecrackers going off in small bunches in the new parking lot:
Suddenly, something a bit bigger was going off in a corner of a credit union parking lot about a block away:
Bigger things started happening in the parking lot right below my window – mostly from parking space #125. Keep the package that’s parked there in mind:
When it stopped, I could see an awful lot of smoke covering the lot. By the time I got the framing, focusing and exposure done, some it had dissipated, but you can still see enough of it to get the idea:
Meanwhile, yet another group was doing things on a smaller scale in the corner of the lot to my right:
They had shot off firecrackers in traffic cones and launched what appeared to be bottle rockets from those same cones. At one point, a police car showed up and I figured they’d get chased away. The cop left, the guys stayed and shot off more stuff, including this time exposure of a bottle rocket taking off from Cape Cone-naveral:
You’ll see more of them in the video.
So the night wasn’t a total loss. It was fun trying to capture everything going on right in front of me.
When I got up this morning, I looked out the window to see if the lot was fire-scorched or explosion-scarred. It wasn’t, but I DID see this in space #125:
I had just gotten up and hadn’t had breakfast yet, but I decided to go out and document whatever was left behind in this lot and the credit union lot before someone cleaned it all up. This lot (space #125):
Credit union lot:
Back to this lot (the firecracker/bottle-rocket crew):
And if you want to join the Space#125 club, it’s 40 bucks a pop:
But you may have to go out-of-town to get one (or six):
Oh yeah………………..the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFBu62VCrvc
Can’t believe that your landlord cut off roof access. I would definitely keep on him about that. How can you live without an outdoor view of beautiful downtown Hackensack?