Photos of Disneyland's periphery

Disneyland fireworks go off every weekend night at 9:30 p.m., except when delayed by hazy weather, whereupon they are usually delayed until 9:45 or 10:00. There is ordinarily a fixed order of the fireworks, starting with two simultaneous tracers that arc toward each other, then many alternations between overhead bursts and ground tracers, sometimes going off together, then a grand finale.

This collection of fireworks photos was taken from the second floor of American States University, north of Ball Road, which places the CM parking building and TDAB in the foreground. (Note the red-lighted stairwell of TDAB near the bottom centers of the photos.) These photos are shown in the order in which they were taken, to give an idea of the ordinary progression of the show.

These two tracers arcing toward each other signal the start of the fireworks show.

This 3-circle configuration is supposed to be a Mickey head.

This green burst had rockets whizzing off in erratic trails.

This burst subdivided into these smaller, more numerous bursts.

Bright tracers have many variations of angle and number of launches.

The colors in this burst are partitioned with one color per region.

A pretty blue burst.

Red-and-gold bursts with different speeds per color.

Sometimes the ground works are going on while the sky works are going.

Tracer-like fireworks are impressive in these simultaneous fanned launches.

Erratic rockets whiz off in random directions after the main burst.

These small, bright, green, gentle bursts go on for a while.

These slow, sparkling, golden fountain-like bursts go on long enough to allow zooming in for closer shots.

Like a fuzzy-armed starfish.

The single circular bursts of the '80s have now advanced to concentric circular bursts.

A wheel with spokes.

A smiley face! Amazing.

An impressive 3-dimensional geometric shape.

Pretty blue-and-gold bursts.

Large, overlapping, sparkling bursts.

These embers looks like sparklers, and crackle loudly like rain as they fall.

The tracer-like ground works are sometimes multicolored, not just white.

The grand finale, lighting up the buildings and trees on the ground.

One amusing side effect of the fireworks is that their heavier blasts cause numerous car alarms on side streets to chirp briefly with each blast. Also, when the fireworks start, cars often pull off to pause or park so the occupants can watch the fireworks, which often has the unfortunate effect of blocking roadways or causing dangerous driving.

PHOTO TIPS: For fireworks photos, if you turn off the camera's automatic focusing mechanism and manually set the focal distance to infinity, that will allow faster camera reaction time, which is important for such quick events that happen in a fraction of a second. The drawback will be that it will take prohibitively long to zoom in on any particular fireworks.

Created: May 5, 2007
Updated: May 7, 2007