The Inevitable Fireworks Pics...and a Surprise

I've had a few posts in the past week with lots of text and no photos at all. Let's even things out with a handful of pictures and not much text. Ready?


I only saw one of the three main Tucson fireworks shows from the house this year. Unlike last year, though, most of the explosions were not behind a tree.


I took over a hundred photos, almost all of them with my camera resting on the roof of John's car.


The camera doesn't have a fireworks setting, as far as I know, and I probably went for the wrong setting. Still, I did okay, I think. For some of these I've boosted the saturation and sharpened lightly, and on all of them I've done some severe cropping and adjusting the tone values. They're still kind of fuzzy, but overall I think they came out better than last year.

And now for the surprise:


Early this afternoon we went to see the Brad Bird Pixar film Ratatouille over at Park Place Mall. (I liked it, but not as much as The Incredibles.) When we were at the theater a month ago for Pirates 3, we saw a Simpsons couch gag display, but I didn't have my camera with me. This time I did. Enjoy!

Funny how Homer holds the candy as if it were a remote. Mmmm...tasty remote.

The women of the family seem happy today.

And of course Bart has to be different.

The one thing that bothers me about life-sized, 3-D Simpsons is that the yellow skin tone looks much weirder and more disturbing than in a cartoon.

(I'm adding the blogplugs tag because people might want to see the Simpsons shots, Joe. Hope you don't mind!)

Karen

P.S. Carly mades it down to the temporary "Kwik-E-Mart" in Mountain View, CA, and came back with some fun pics. See them here.