OddThinking

An assortment of short images about fireworks, inspired by Territory Day fireworks in Darwin.

• One day a year where amateurs can let off fireworks legally in Darwin. An audience waiting patiently on the beach for the professionals to start their performance, while nearby amateurs upstage them with the constant bang-bang of cheap fireworks. The opening salvo from the professionals, right on time, lighting up the sky and making it very clear what the difference is between amateurs and professionals.

• Walking through an empty city at night, while the noise from a nearby fireworks display, hidden by the skyline, echoes off the buildings – sounds enough like gunfire in the movies to provide an unnatural impetus to duck and scrabble between the cover of buildings.

• A sea of tiny little flashes in the crowd nicely accompanying the fireworks. Caused by thousands of little cameras trying their hardest to illuminate the night sky with their tiny flashes.

• A pyrotechnics competition – every night a different countries representatives perform – leading to instant expertise from the populace: “Yes, the Japanese had an excellent ground-based display, but for sheer intensity and overall presentation, you have to hand it to the Americans.”

• A sea of tiny blue screens, as people in the crowd hold their digital cameras high in the air to take photos of fireworks they can barely see themselves.

• As part of a pyrotechnics workshop, standing on the roof of a condemned building, as a thunderstorm approached, clutching a large metal structure, covered in fireworks, in the wind, as a “fountain” pyrotechnic – behaving unpredictably as rain-soaked gunpowder clumps – sprayed glowing hot metals on other parts of the roof, and the wind was shifting, trying deparately to remember: “My mother warned me about something like this. What was it she said again?”

• A TV special on US Independence Day, showing overworked fire-fighters on their busiest night, rushing to a job under an archway of fireworks being set off by drunk amateurs.

• A friend working in the industry giving regular reports about about failing fireworks injurying fellow pyrotechnicians and members of the audience.

• Picking out a spot on Sydney Harbour twelve hours before fireworks to ensure a good photograph. Regretting after about four hours.

• Royal Adelaide Show announcer, cajoling the audience as he had every night for two weeks, and every year for generations, to yell out what colours they hoped to see next. Cynical youths yelling, as their kin had every night for two weeks, and every year for generations, “Black! Black! We want to see black!”