Day 21: Capturing fire
Using fire as your source light is challenging enough. The harsh tones, shadows and lingering movement of the light, make it very hard to correctly expose and light up your subject. Imagine having to capture actual fire as your main subject.
To make things clear, this photo was captured under adult supervision, indoors, with a fire distinguisher nearby. Ok, maybe not. But it did set off the fire alarm in our apartment.
I contemplated with this one. I wasn't sure what type of fire I wanted to capture. The lack of other resources like a campfire, a beach fire or a bonfire, made my decision a bit easier.
I opted in for fire produced by a match. The reason was that I wanted to also capture the smoke a match produces when it first lights up.
At the same time, however, I wanted to increase my shutter speed to more than 1:4000 so I can freeze movement of the lit match. That made things slightly harder to correctly expose and brighten up my composition in order to capture the smoke as well.
I did not want to use any flashlight as this meant that the shadows of the fire would disappear.
I set my camera on a tripod and set it to capture 10 images on the continuous mode, so it captures the entire sequence. I opened my aperture to f/2.4 and burned more than half of box of matches until I got something I liked.