Diwali was here and now its gone. It is without a doubt the best Indian festival in my opinion. The lights and the fireworks make the atmosphere the most festive possible, unfortunately also adding to the smoke in the atmosphere. The fireworks are loud and irritating, but it wouldn’t be diwali without them.

This was the first diwali where I had my DSLR with me. In fact my only interest in this diwali was the opportunity to be able to get some nice shots of the various kinds of fireworks going off. Even though, finally, I only got to take photos of three or four type of fireworks, namely Chakras, Rockets, Flower Pots(anaar), and Sparklers, at the end of it all I was pretty satisfied with the shots I was able to get.

All the shots that I took were handheld and mostly on shutter priority with the shutter open for 1 second. This was good enough to catch any trails made by the fireworks and also keep the exposure low so that the pictures didn’t get washed out. The people who were actually lighting the fireworks were so enthusiastic that they hardly gave me time to experiment with any other settings. Besides they seemed to be having so much fun, I didn’t want to turn it into a boring photo session. So I did the best that I could under the given conditions.

Collected below are some of my favourite pictures from the Diwali just past.

You can leave your comments below or head over to the Flickr Photo Page to see the higher resolution images and leave comments there too.