Happy almost Fourth of July. A holiday that, I don’t know about you, feels particularly weird to celebrate in light of, well, everything going on in the home of the red, white, and blue these days. If you are celebrating, here’s my one request. Please, please, puh-leez, don’t Instagram any fireworks content you may take on Wednesday. You don’t have to. You really don’t.
Chances are good that your followers know what fireworks look like. They have likely seen them before. If they haven’t, they can Google them. You don’t need to show them. If you’ve previously Instagrammed fireworks on this annual July holiday, we will forgive you. (To be clear, this plea applies to any and all social-media platforms.) I will forgive you. So long as you can forgive me for having also fallen prey to the siren song of the fireworks Instagram back in 2016, posting a Boomerang with the very original caption, “Do you ever feel like a plastic bag?” Look what Katy Perry hath wrought. My camera roll from that particular date is dozens and dozens of attempts to get just the right shot. My shot, ultimately, was fine. (Back then, Instagram told Select All that Boomerang use jumped 157 percent that week … thank you, fireworks.)
Previous transgressions forgiven, let’s move on to the Fourth of July in the year two thousand and eighteen together in our vow not to Instagram the damn fireworks. Not to Boomerang them. Or film them. Imagine. You’re standing outside in the sweltering darkness awaiting the evening’s pyrotechnic show. The appointed hour arrives and then … nobody pulls out their phone. Your view is unobstructed; there are no columns of blue light to distract you from the sky explosions happening in front of you. You allow the sparkling, booming gaiety to occur without committing it to digital memory. “Gosh,” you say to your fellow fireworks viewers, “that was great.” When the fireworks are over, you go home. You pride yourself on being a true patriot. Happy birthday, America.
Editor’s note: If you absolutely must photograph the fireworks, make sure to do it in burst mode. That way your camera will take a whole bunch of photos in rapid succession and you can choose the best one later. An alternative to this is to just film the fireworks and then pull a still out of the video. Apologies for this blatant SEO grab. Also … what time is the Fourth of July?
