What Knoxvile calls "Boomsday" exploded across the Tennessee River
Saturday night, turning the sky Tennessee orange and a patriotic red,
white and blue, above a waterfront crowd estimated at 300,000.
The weekend Big Orange football schedule moved the non-gridiron
fireworks back a day, but no one seemed to be complaining.
The hilltop church parking lot next to the Maplehurst Inn was the wrong
angle for a shot of the impressive waterfall
of sparks cascading from one of the city's bridges, a trademark of the
annual event. But I was in a great location to capture the height,
color and sound of
the finale with my shirt-pocket-size Canon 230 digital camera.
While I've always thought of it as a "still" camera, even this older
model can take short videos, with sound.
Here's an example (plug in your earphones and click to launch
a 720KB clip in a new window):
Given that "altitude" was a big factor, I turned the camera to
"portrait" format to take a few stills -- and shot some video
that way too. As far as I knew (see below), there was no way to rotate a
Quicktime video 90 degrees, so you may want to set your laptop
on edge -- or press your left ear to the desk -- while you watch
this longer burst near the finale (1.4MB): 
UPDATED: The original version of this note said, "Maybe some of the technical wizards reading this weblog (you know who
you are) already know of a hack that allows vertical-format
digital video on the Web. If not, maybe this will be the
inspiration for a whole new technology. (I'm not sure I'd watch Spiderman sideways, but the sinking of the Titanic
could be interesting.)" Hurrah! Video blogger Steve Garfield came through
with a pointer to some very simple instructions for rotating video in
Quicktime Pro (see comments). Here's the result: Same fireworks, now going up!
(updated 09/10)
1:16:57 PM 
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