That aside, Victor and I wanted to do something epic for the last photo. Something we'd remember and we hadn't done before. Something that tied together a lot of what we'd learned over the last year.
Fire has been a common theme that we've been very interested in all year, so we packed up a couple of new trick and set out for the quarries. It's still freezing out, and the water was somewhat frozen. Wasn't exactly the most pleasant experience being outside for hours.
At first, we tried the creamer cannon. We mostly succeed in lighting Victor and the ground on fire, so that was abandoned pretty quickly.
Next, we moved on to the steel wool. That stuff just never, ever gets old. At the north end of the quarries, there's a big rock cliff that overlooks the water. We both thought it'd be a great spot to do some raining fire.
Last night, we also did some fire pictures. After doing some tests, and based on prior shots, we came up with the ideal exposure for fire of f/11 and ISO100 and around 30s. The time doesn't matter as much, because at night there's so little light that the background doesn't really show up. The settings only capture the fire, which is really perfect for applications.
However, tonight I wanted to get the background exposed too. With all the fire we're doing, there needed to be some context.
But I couldn't get the background in on the same exposure with the fire, as it would take maybe 16 minutes to get a decent shot. That's not practical.
To fix this problem, I did a base exposure of the background at f/3.5, 30s, and ISO1600. These are also idea exposure settings for my camera and lens set up that I discovered the other day while shooting the light house. With the moon out, there was a lot of detail in the landscape, as well as good stars. It was perfect shooting conditions.
We shot a big panoramic, with 4 framings. By framings I mean 4 shots to complete the panoramic. Each framing was framed in a way so that the most fire would be captured. We mostly did the cable and whisk method of making fire, but we also attached a shorter cable to a screw gun to get the same effect. It's pretty obvious from the photo were the locations we picked for fire, but mostly they were spots where there would be lots of area for the fire to spread. We also tried one new thing, a ball of wire with the wool inside. It got thrown off the top of cliff :)
Basically, the procedure went like this. I'd take the base exposure, then we'd do as much fire in that location as we could. Then repeat! Ice makes a great surface to bounce off of btw...
Editing took a little thought, but was pretty easy. I first corrected the lens distortion in Lr, then moved over to Ps. I made four groups, each with the photos from the framing in them. This way, I could align the images based on the base exposures, but the fire pictures would be aligned too since I'm moving the whole group. I only had the base exposures turned on in each group. I started with the bottom, and worked up. The alignment only had to be rough, since the final image would have a very dark background only for context.
Once everything was aligned, I turned on all the fire pictures, and set them to lighten. However, the base layers were too bright, so I took them and put them in their own group. This way, I could put them on the bottom, and then added a levels adjustment layer above them. I darkened it quite a bit, so that mostly only the highlights were visible.
I moved over to Lr next, were all I did was some selective clarity adjustment on the fire and stars.
And that's it. All done. The last photo.
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