More Nights With Fire!

The power was out last night after I got home from shooting, so I couldn't do post. But I'm doing one right now and then another one later tonight! I've got more photos to edit than ever, so I'm going to busy for the next few days.

Last night was a scheduled power outage, so my friends and I went into town to do some light painting, because when else do you get a chance to light paint in a totally dark town?

Only we weren't really light painting....we were fire painting! The results from Wednesday night were so cool, we got more steel wool and brought that along with us.

Since it was a planned power outage, there were tons of police and utility vehicles roaming the streets doing work and making sure the town wasn't ransacked. Surprisingly, the utility people didn't even stop to watch the fire going everywhere, and the police actually gave us the thumbs up and took a break to watch us! I think it was mainly to make sure we didn't light the gas station on fire...but still! We got to throw fire all around Friday Harbor!

It was super cold, even with the fire. I think we spent about three or so hours outside in the freezing wind. At one point, we went into this little alley way. The picture we set up in there turned out really well, but since it was an enclosed space, the sparks flew everywhere and it was like a war zone. Everyone was dodging them and Brandon got a hole burned in his sock. :) Entertainment.

Learning from the first time we did this, I shot at f7.1 and ISO100 last night. This dropped the light coming in and being written by maybe 2 or 3 stops and made a world of difference. The centers of the  spinning fire weren't completely overblown, but the spark trails were still very visible. I also used a 10mm lens to capture everything on the street.

In post, I composited about half the images I have in this post. The ones I did composite, I used a combination of layer masks and blending modes. Linear dodge, screen, and lighten are the best modes for compositing this light trails, as they only add the bright areas of the images. I could have used luminosity masks, but that takes a little longer and it think it'd have the same results. I might experiment with that after I write this though...

Once I'd composited them the Ps, I just adjusted the color a bit in Lr to be more red, and upped the shadows a bit. These are pretty much true to life images. Maybe some clarity adjustments were applied too.

See you tomorrow!