Pre-Fourth Fireworks attempts

I decided to play around with photographing fireworks - fighting the crowds and the mosquitos (don't even talk to me about MetroPark!). I decided to avoid the crowds at St. Clair Shores, and go around to the MetroPark just north and look back across the bay.

St. Clair Shores I started out on the MetroPark side of Lake St. Clair ... but without my zoom lens .. can you see the problem?
Through the magic of image-editing To salvage the several rolls of film that I burned in my attempts to squint into the distance ...

So then I decided I had to get situated better for the next fireworks attempt ... at the LIVONIA SPREE. I camped out 3 hours early to get a place in the parking lot where I could shoot from the back of my truck bed. (In the future, I would probably stay farther back and use the zoom again - I like the shots with the zoom at the end!) [The reason they seem "shifted low" is that I was trying to avoid the cars and light poles, etc in the lower part of the frame.]

Then I tried using the 400 mm zoom lens - wow .. I like these shots ...