Heh, I know what you mean about expensive hobbies, although re:photography, if you can manage to be content with your gear and push your own skills rather than needing new gear it might become cost effective in terms of $$ per hours of entertainment. I’ve gone through long periods of lusting after new cameras and even though I’d still like one, especially with better low-light capabilities, I’m still using my first dSLR. Not sure if that holds with lens investments or not. So far all my lenses have been less than $400, haven’t branched out to the $1000+ ones yet. Wouldn’t mind a fast wide-angle zoom though, they look sweet.

I read somewhere that 2–4s was a good shutter speed for fireworks so I started in that range and then decided to see what happened if I closed the aperture a bit more and decreased shutter speed a bit, and I liked it. So, I had these settings for a bit and then I think I opened back to 4s at the end when there were more going up at once (and when I realised I’d left the ISO at 400 from some shots earlier in the evening I put that back down to 200 for the end of the display as well).