Want fun in low light? Try FIRE!

At the end of class last week, I was encouraged to post some examples of my fire-performance photography. Now that Marc has the posting permissions fixed-up... I guess I'll do that.

I really like low-light photographs, but when it also includes a moving subject, good luck getting a nice sharp photo... the slow shutter speed needed to get your exposure tends to blur almost any subject.

But when those subjects just happen to be providing their very own light-source, as fire performers do, that can tip things in your favour. Woo hoo!

I happen to have the good fortune to be married to a woman, whose claim to fame back when I met her in 1999, was that she was Vancouver's *only* Firebreathing Bellydancer. Things have changed a lot in the years since, and fire performing has really caught-on in Vancouver. We've seen a number of other people since who mix various forms of fire performance with bellydance, but as yet I haven't observed any other people doing that particular combination.



This photo is of my wife blowing a good-sized fireball to help ignite an effigy of a man that was being burnt at a local event last year that was thrown by some Vancouver members of the Burning Man community.

It was shot on a borrowed Canon EOS-30D, using my 50mm f/1.8, shooting wide open. It's quite a lot noisier than it needed to be, since I was shooting at 1600 ISO. The fact is that I needed to go to that high ISO to get the fast shutter speed for many of my other shots that night, but this particular fireball produced so much light that ultimately I could've got the same shot using a slightly slower shutter speed at ISO 400 or so, and have introduced far less noise. -sigh- Always something to do better next time.



This shot was also from a Burning Man event... this one put on by the community down in Seattle last November. A large group got on stage and did some very intricate fire performances. Many of my shots were good, but this is easily a favorite due to the wonderful intimacy displayed by the performers.

This was shot handheld on my Canon Rebel XTi, using a 50mm f/1.2L lens that I rented for the weekend from Beau Photo. I believe that I was also shooting wide open here, and necessarily using 1600 ISO to keep my shutter speeds nice and speedy. The Rebel XTi's performance at 1600 isn't particularly great either, but I think it held up okay here.



Finally, I'm including this shot to illustrate that you don't always need a big bad DSLR to get a compelling fire shot. This one is a shot of my wife just doing a bit of spinning practice with a friend down at Trout Lake. It was shot with a simple little Pentax point-n-shoot, just in it's automatic night mode. Not having a fast lens, or high-ISO capabilities, there was no potential to freeze the motion here, but I think that the blurring of the path of the staff gives this shot some good energy. (I'll admit that this wasn't a conscious shooting choice. The photo was simply taken long before I invested in a DSLR.)

As you can guess, there's rather a lot of haphazardness with shooting fire performances, mostly because the performers are typically playing to the audience rather than for the camera, and you really need to just adapt to the shooting conditions as best you can. It's great because you really never know what you might get, and it can be far more challenging than your average daytime shooting.

If you want to try this out, my recommendation is to grab the fastest lens you can... typically it'll be a prime. If you shoot Canon, then the 50mm f/1.8 is a great option because it's really quite sharp and it's extremely cheap. I pretty much exclusively use that lens or my Sigma 30mm f/1.4 for my fire photos at the moment.

Also you'll probably want to very specifically control the autofocussing mechanism of your camera, as best as you can. DSLR's have a heck of a hard time pulling sharp focus in low light. In the case of my camera, its center-positioned autofocus point performs best in low light, so I force focussing to be done at that point and then do a lot of focus-and-recomposing to get my shot. I've even gone as far as investing in the Canon Speedlite Transmitter ST-E2, not to use for its ability to remote-triggering a flash - but to park in my hotshoe and allow its infrared autofocus-assist mechanism help me pull focus for shots like these using available light.

So, I hope that was somewhat interesting.

Feel free to poke further around my Flickr galleries (http://www.flickr.com/photos/yonderboy/), where you'll undoubtedly see many more fire shots, as well as lots of bellydance shots... all buried under literally thousands of shots from my annual trips to Burning Man. ;-) However, I should warn that not all photos there are 100% work-safe... so surf at your own risk.

Ciao,
Frank Roberts