Last Saturday the town of Nagakute hosted a small, late summer festival. This was a downsized version of the much larger, mid-summer festival held every year until it was cancelled last year due to budget constraints. The "big" festival featured a large bon odori stage and a 90 minute fireworks show, and attracted huge crowds. I attended the big festival several years back with my family, but after squeezing through festival goers packed as tightly as riders on a rush-hour subway car, with nowhere to sit to watch the fireworks and impossible lines for the food stalls, we had in subsequent years taken to just packing some snacks and watching the fireworks from a local park three or four kilometers away from the festival site, or even just watching the fireworks from our 10th floor apartment. So, when it was cancelled last year, we just thought, oh, well, so much for that. This year, however, our daughter learned from classmates that there would be a smaller festival, with food stands, but no dance stage and only 10 minutes of fireworks, and that it would be held in early September. Several of her friends were going and she really wanted to go too, so we agreed. We went there by bicycle to avoid the parking dilemma. While the turnout was good, it didn't attract outsiders the way the old festival did, and the feel was mellower, with a more local vibe. We saw several people we knew there. There was a taiko drumming stage and maybe ten food stalls. I like the light this time of year more than in early summer. The sun is lower, and casts a warmer, more diffuse light. It also sets earlier, so that we had about an hour of dusk before the fireworks started, where the yellow light from the food stalls glowed like embers against the cooler colors of the darkening sky. Before the fireworks started, we made sure to find a spot next to the rice fields to put down our plastic sheet. I had my mini-tripod and my compact F 1.8 28 mm prime lens. The fireworks were small, but close, and the 28 mm range turned out to be perfect for catching the launch from the ground to the burst in the sky. The fireworks were launched at a rate of one every 30 seconds for the first 8 minutes, followed by a two minute finale, and then it was over. We packed up our stuff and biked home. All in all, it was a pleasant, mellow evening spent with our Nagakute neighbors, and I think I was able to capture a bit of the feeling in these photographs.