Seattle Fireworks.....

Detail Man wrote:

My guess would be because the fireworks were being launched around the Space Needle (the law of simple symmetry), and your somewhat contrived attempts to appeal to some "arty" preconception may have led you to frame too close, somehow then miraculously missing the bulk of the interesting activity happening all around your artificially tunneled vision. Who'd a thunk it ?

Au contraire. I watched that particular fireworks display on TV (something that normally bores me to tears where it comes to just about any fireworks show) - and it was indeed an intense and quite glorious non-stop ostentatious visual orgiastic bacchanalia of tantalizing spacey tinkles and incendiary revenue dispersion on the part of the city presumably in the hopes of increasing future tourism income that left even the jaded twit cheerleaders at KING 5 quite wide eyed and speechless.

And there you were, freezing your tush off to get a couple of "keepers". Just you and your "rule of thirds", and the night.

Fireworks as subject-matter are so comfortably low in resolution requirements that one can well afford to frame in order to take in the entire scene, then crop in post-processing in order to please the eye and any artistic whims that may tickle your fancy.

The shots I posted were JPGs recorded using a 8 Mpixel Panasonic FZ30 with a 1/1.7" image-sensor, and post-cropped with impunity with liberal usage of color saturation using PaintShop Pro.

Making sure to have locked focus to "infinity"

as well as to have chosen an F-Number high enough

that will ensure that the image-sensor photo-sites are not saturated by the intensity of light, and setting the Shutter Time to around 4 Seconds (or so) with any "long shutter NR" disabled so that no dark-shot is recorded (increasing the lag to 8 Seconds), the hardest part (as you noted) is to fire-off the Shutter in anticipation (as individuals projectiles initially rise).

The 2007 Lake Union 4th of July show had a fairly comfortable degree of separation in time between projectiles. Nevertheless, it was chaotic, and I was lucky to extract those few shots posted out of more than around 100 stabs at it.

The post 2007 Lake Union 4th of July shows - as well as this particular show that you shot - have evolved into nearly continuous streams of multiple and simultaneously combusting projectiles that do seem to be somewhat more lacking in color these days -

and are (due to the density of explosions in time) extremely hard to attempt to anticipate and time effectively.

I couple of Summers ago I set up to try to capture the Lake Union 4th of July show again from a local building-roof. It was a chaotic and frustrating nightmare that yielded only what were horribly blown-out shots (F-Number set too low) that were universally ghastly and uninteresting. And yes, they were framed too close. So, I gave up the profession of fireworks capturing for good forthwith, and occasionally wheel-out my handful of lucky successes from 2007. Just like the "pros" ... LOL.