More fire fun!

I was out at Jamie's tonight doing more pre-production for a short we're making, and I remembered that the creamer canon was at his place. So naturally there had to be fire pictures. Because fire pictures are awesome. And fun. And awesome.

We went through a bunch of idea before we settled on having me huddling behind an old washing machine while he shot giant fire balls at it from the other side. Quite entertaining and a bit scary. Having fire literally a foot over your head.

I originally had thought to shoot with a 10mm lens, but that turned out to be much to wide and I switched over to 18mm. 10mm is really not very useful for most circumstances. I only use it when I'm shooting in a enclosed space or if I'm doing night photography. It looks cool and all, but it's not needed 90% of the time.

When photographing fire, stopping motion is very important...most of the time. Tonight it was important. If there was motion blur, the fire would just blend into a giant yellow cloud that doesn't look that cool.

I first did some tests at 1/250 of a second, and that wasn't quite enough. I pushed the ISO to 400 and went up to 1/320 of a second at f3.5. This gave me the stopping power I needed while also not cutting too far into the light that the fire gives off. I was relying on the light of the fire to illuminate the scene.

Obviously I couldn't take the picture that I was in...well I could but I didn't want to mess up the timing or my pose. So the other guy that lives on the same property as Jamie, Patrick, tripped the shutter for me. The camera was on drive mode, so he just had to timing the beginning of the sequence right so I wouldn't have to sort through 404839083598 black images and also so that no fire could be missed because of a late start. Thanks, Patrick! Perfect timing btw.

Anywho, in Ps I just made layer masks for all my layers of fire and set all the layers to lighten. This let the highlights come through to the layers below. I masked out the parts I didn't want of the fire. It was pretty simple to edit together.

To chose my images I wanted to blend together, I looked for the most spotted fire. Not the biggest ball of fire, but the ones with the most texture and contrast. When these were put together would make the most dramatic image because they wouldn't blend together into one giant white blob.

In Lr, I brightened myself up with an adjustment brush, and then applied some split toning. Blue to the shadows and purple to the highlights. Just a little bit, not very much at all.

Finally, high pass sharpening filter was applied.

Does it bother anyone that my feet are cut off? I'm not sure about it...

See you tomorrow!