To celebrate the final Harry Potter movie coming out today (it's amazing how many people I know went to the midnight showing), I decided it was time for these two photos to make another appearance on the blog. I actually haven't seen the last installment of the movies yet; Thomas and I need to see 7.1 before going to see the final chapter. We'll probably go see it next week. I know, I know- we should be in lovingly hand-made costumes amid the throngs of people seeing it NOW, but alas, I'm here in my office, blogging.

Brooklyn is a HUGE potter fan (I imagine she's watching HP 7 right now actually... probably in her wizard hat. She's awesome!), and given that we did their formals on July 3rd last year we took advantage of the window for legal firework goodness.

Happy Wizard Day, everyone!

For the fourth of july, we decided to take advantage of the opportunity for some pretty neat backgrounds and scheduled Brooklyn and Kagan's formals for the evening. We planned to take some normal photos at a couple of different spots in Springville that we had scouted out, and then play around when it got dark to see what we could get with the fireworks. A half an hour before the shoot Thomas and I decided to go get some smaller fireworks of our own to play around with between sunset and the fireworks show. I am so glad that we did! We got a great variety of photos, but some of the "small firework" photos are my favorites.
In light of the upcoming state holiday this saturday, I figured I would get these firework photos up now and share them with you all... :) (For all my out-of-state readers, the 24th of July is "Pioneer Day", which essentially comes out to a second fourth where people barbeque, set off more fireworks, and have lots of parades. As for me, I think any excuse to blow things up and see pretty colors is perfectly fine.)

We really lucked out- before the sunset we got some wonderful daylight photos. Not too harsh, some nice backlighting, and enough direct light to manipulate to my heart's content.

Something about this one just makes me smile...

Now you're probably thinking as you look at these next photos "Oh wow, Whitney must have enhanced the colors on that sunset- no way that is real." However, if you were to think that, you would be WRONG. wrongwrongwrong. I can say with absolute honesty that this sunset was just as incredible as it looks. If fact, I think I actually decreased the saturation of the colors a smidge. It was unbelievable.