Crackers!

We were invited to a BBQ dinner and fireworks on Monday (Guy Fawkes) with friends. They have two young children that were very excited about the prospect of seeing their crackers going off. We had a nice meal and as it got dark we started making preparations, filling a large bin with compost as a base to sit the fireworks in and taking everything down to the back of the section.

I had taken my camera so that I could play about with the settings and try to get some photos. I'm trying to learn a bit more about the multitude of features on the camera each time I use it so it was an interesting experiment. A lot of the photos I took were duds... blurry, over exposed, under exposed, or just plain missed the action. There were a few that have escaped the delete key... the sparkler photos turned out kind of cool.

It seems to me that the crackers aren't as spectactular, don't last as long and the sparklers burn too quickly now. Everything seemed so much more magical when I was a kid. They can't have changed too much though because the kids still obviously enjoyed themselves as much as I used to.

I feel quite sad at the prospect that fireworks may be banned in the future because of accidents that occur or the down-right stupidity of some of the people that use them or the poor (dangerous) quality of some brands. Why does the majority have to miss out because of the actions of a few? Every year it seems we get closer to losing this. There are reports of burns and fires caused by fireworks. I find it a bit strange how around Guy Fawkes the media reports on fires more (even though many of these aren't necessarily firework related) but they are really more interested in ratings so fuelling the fire with sensational reporting is the name of the game. Grrrr!

There are so many things out there in far more use and causing far more damage on a more regular basis than fireworks... cars.... alcohol... just for starters. Both individually and in conjunction with one another cause more havoc on a daily basis than fireworks do but I don't think they'll be getting banned anytime soon!

Like I said ... crackers!!