Christmas Eve was last night, and my family has a tradition of opening presents from the family that night, then doing Santa presents in the morning. Victor has been a close friend for some time now, and so of course he got quite a few presents under the tree too. One of which happened to be a bag of steel wool. My parents know we like to use it for pictures, and that we are constantly running out.
That bag turned out to be the present of the night for us.
After presents, we went down to Maclin's and watched Ninja Turtles. Speaking of which, I think that one might come close to the sin count of the most recent transformers. The "everything wrong with _____" Youtube channel is fantastic, and I can't wait to see what they do with this movie. Let's just say it isn't the best made movie ever...
As we were watching, Victor was hanging long strands of steel wool from Maclin's bed, and then lighting them on fire. If you've never done that, you really really need to. It's epic. In light of this awesome epicness, after the movie was over we went into the shop and started burning the rest of the bag into the wee hours of the morning.
So many different ideas were tried, but the one I liked the most was just taking simple pictures of the burning wool. We tried for quite a while to get the right pictures, but with a macro lens it was incredibly difficult.
I'll put it into perspective. Imagine you're looking through binoculars at a sparrow. That sparrow is flying at about 60mph and randomly changing directions. There's also a lightning storm so you eyes have to keep adjusting to keep track of the bird. On top of this, the focus on the binoculars is terrible, so you have to keep readjusting it to keep the bird sharp. AND the binoculars are as big as your face and you can't hold them up, so they are on a tripod that you control by moving your body.
That's was it was like. No wonder no pictures worth keeping were had. There are a few semi decent ones, but most were bleh. I had to control the camera by pinching the tripod handle between my arm and body, then hit the shutter with one hand and focus on the other. With the macro lens, the sparks in the wool travel really freaking fast when looking through the lens, so it's really hard to track.
After an hour or so of that nonsense, (which was still awesome to watch) we wised up a bit. Instead of making a big pile of wool, we flattened it out and made it as 2D as possible. This made focusing much easier, because I only had to focus once between the burning started! Everything about the camera as pre-set, exposure, framing, focus, etc. Everything got set up, then the burning started and I used a remote shutter.
This set up allowed two things. Firstly, it eliminated a lot of variables that could ruin the photo. If it didn't turn out, it was the sparks being in the wrong spot or something like that. Secondly, since all the photos of a burn session were framed the same, they could be composited in Ps!
I shot at f/22 (the sparks are really bright) ISO100, and 1s. This longer exposure gave the necessary trails to capture the sparks. As the metal heats and cools it changes colors, which you can capture in a longer exposure. Not too long, then it blurs together, but just enough and you can get some awesome effects.
In Ps, I took the most promising looking series, and composted them together with the lighten blend mode. This only let the bright areas of all the layers combined show through. In other words, in any particular spot on the photo, only one layer that is the brightest there shows through. Pretty great way to composite light trails. However, just doing that doesn't always look good, so I went back in a made some layer masks over over exposed parts or other such pieces that I didn't like.
Nothing done in Lr, this is pretty much right out of the camera. Enjoy!
See you tomorrow!
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