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


Marilyn

Photographer sharing beauty, grace & joy in photographs and blog posts. I live in the Twin Cites in Minnesota, the land of lakes, trees, and wonderful nature.

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!

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