Sitting on the sofa in our family room, I suddenly noticed fireworks out the glass sliding door. In the Middle of May??? Although the local country club usually does a Labor Day fireworks display, that is a much, much smaller event. Plus the Country Club's display comes from the opposite direction. Mature trees and new house in that direction now make most of that display next to impossible to see. Occasionally, we'll still see a peek of high blast or two that reach above the tree tops. However, the main part of that show is no longer clearly visible. As the neighborhood has matured and become more cosmopolitan, many of our views for a lot of different things have greatly disappeared. When we first built our home, we could clearly see the Fourth of July fireworks from 3 towns from our deck; including the ones in downtown Kansas City. But those days are long gone. This evening in May, I know fireworks definitely weren't coming from any of those places mentioned. However since they could fill a photo frame, the fireworks must have been reasonable "close". But not extremely close because there was only a little smoke at the very end.

At first, I assumed these totally unexpected May fireworks would be a quick show and not even worth going outside to see better. Fireworks are legal here. Our various neighbors will shoot fireworks off for the Fourth of July. Although potentially dangerous, those blasts are usually fairly fast and impossible to photograph. These surprise May fireworks instead seemed to be some sort of actual formal display with more powerful blasts. When they continued on and on for almost 20 minutes, I realized that whatever was going on was not a little deal. It was worth photographing.

So I grabbed a camera; which had a dead battery... I then grabbed another camera, which had a no memory card. So I removed a card from the card reader. It was there waiting for me to download what I had taken earlier in the day. That Lexar card, however,malfunctioned!!! It now unexpectedly & permanently seems to be unable to allow new photos to be written to the card. I'll have to deal with that problem later. Still, I didn't give up, The fireworks continued to be high above the trees and continuing on & on. I haven't had such an experience at home in many, many years. Finally, I grabbed the little FZ300 Bridge Camera and shoved a almost full Memory card and 3/4 dead battery into that. Those were all I could quickly get my hands on that worked. The camera turned on, and the card could record photos. So I was in business!

Obviously, all my fumbling with the cameras took time. So this fireworks display was a really long one. At the end, I got my act together and took a few photographs out the open Solar Room door. Hand holding a humble camera usually doesn't produce the best nighttime image. Nevertheless, I was very pleased with the few shots that I finally got. They were way better than what I was expecting. The keeper rate was 8 out of 10...

I'm guessing that the above moment captured was some sort of grand finale because the sky was literally filled with blasts. I've never before seen these many fireworks cover the sky over my backyard. It was pretty amazing. However, I still don't know who put the display on or exactly where the fireworks were coming from, or why there was a major mid May fireworks show. All I know is that I've never seen such a grandiose fireworks display from my backdoor until now. It was amazing.