Quote of the day: The most tangible of all visible mysteries – fire. -Leigh Hunt
Fire Dancing - Infinity
Today I’m actually writing about photography in my blog. Last night I had a wonderful adventure of taking photographs of a young friend fire dancing in my back yard. It was pure fun, since I didn’t really know how to best capture the wonder of her dancing and decided to treat the photo shoot as a learning experiment. I ended up being happily surprised with some of the photos. And I have some ideas to try next time I can persuade her to come over for another session.
I tried using my new flash with a rear curtain flash but found that illuminated the background too much. This is the first time I’ve used the flash (other than a few experiments) and I have much to learn. I think that if I had adjusted the power of the flash down, I might have had better luck. At any rate, I turned off the flash, set my ISO to 3200 and tried some long exposures. I got some very interesting results.
Timing the shots was challenging. With long exposures and a moving dancer, I found it was more a matter of luck than skill. As time went on, I got better at choosing the right moments.
We also shot some photos of my young friend using a colorfully lighted hula hoop. For those shots, I used my flash with rear curtain sync, adjusting the power down. I think it worked quite well. But I would like to learn more. If you’ve done photography of fire dancing and have any hints on improving my technique, please leave a comment.
Here are a few more of the photos from last night.
Circles
Wings
Still Pose
Colorful
4 Comments
andy1076 · August 30, 2011 at 2:36 am
Your friend is amazing, please compliment her on her incredible skills and thank you for sharing 🙂 🙂
lamorm1 · August 30, 2011 at 2:59 am
She is amazing. I will pass it on to her. Thanks for commenting.
andy1076 · August 30, 2011 at 3:03 am
My pleasure, keep up the great posts 🙂
Katherine Block · August 30, 2011 at 7:00 pm
This was so much fun! Thank you for sharing your talents with me. I can’t wait to work with you again. I think this is going to be a really fun journey for both of us as I would love to explore different intent and character in posing as well as some costume and location consideration 🙂
Now that we have this test run done and have seen some of the results I think we can talk about goals for our next session next time we get together to talk about your website!