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The annual Fourth of July celebration at the Bar-Y is a pure delight! (See comments below this other and selected photos.)

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The evening begins with a dinner in the building in the background of this picture. It concludes with homemade ice cream and strawberries after the fireworks. Through out, it is a wonderful time to enjoy being with extended family and friends in the beauty of rural Iowa. Here, my comfortable lawn chair awaits me beside the camera I will use to shoot the fireworks. My wife is in the next chair as others reserve their places to relax and watch the fireworks.

For those interested in the technical information about the pictures, all pictures with file names starting with DSCN were taken with a Nikon CP 990. The CP 990 was set to full auto except that focus was locked to infinity. Those pictures with file names starting with "P" were taken with an Olympus E-20. The E-20 was run in full manual mode, using a cable release with the shutter set "Bulb" so I could control the length of time the shutter was open by how long I held the release button down. I also had the camera sharpness set to "Soft" and the contrast set to "Low". I use the "Soft" and "Low" settings so that I will have a greater range of options when I do post processing of my images.

All the images I have posted in this series are straight out of the camera without any post processing. They are essentially proofs and the E-20 shots may appear a bit soft because the in-camera sharpening was disabled. They are also full frame as they were captured. They have been downsized for posting on the web, but they have not been cropped.

Use the scrollbar at the left of this window to view all the thumbnails in this section.