The most important piece of equipment I brought to the opening ceremony is called, appropriately, a Super Clamp.

These handy little gadgets will put a lock tight grab on practically everything, assuring a tripod-like base for long exposures without the motion blur often caused by handholding a camera on an exposure of one second or more.

One of the biggest features of the opening ceremony was the fireworks, which would be visible through the donut-hole roof of the Bird's Nest.

We were fortunate that our photo positions were along the front row of the second level of seats. This mean there was a safety railing right in front of us, allowing me to clamp to the railing.

Add a mini-ball head, a camera with a super-wide angle lens (in this case, the Nikon 14-24mm/f.8 lens on the full-frame sensor Nikon D3) and you have a simple recipe for making a pretty nice photo.

With the camera right in front of me, whenever fireworks erupted, I'd just reach over and hit the shutter.

Easy, breezy. Even I could do it.

(Nikon D3, EF 14-24mm/f2.8 lens @ 14mm, ISO 100, 2 seconds @ f22)