My budding photographer friend sent another photo my way for a bit of critique. Here are his original comments on the photo:
The school slaughtered a pig for us, and some of us roasted the meat over bonfires. Several kids set sticks on fire and began swinging them around, so the slower shutter speed was cool for the shot. For some reason it doesn’t look as sharp on the computer as it did on the camera’s LCD, but I still like it. I wish I could have got one of the kids in the picture clearer, but oh well.
I think my friend is thinking in the right direction with this one, though. He is experimenting, and basically, that is the only way to really get a handle on what is going on and how to capture it in the way we want.
If it were me, I would make the darks more dark and really let the flames jump out at us. But I guess then we would lose the children entirely, and that was one of my friend’s objectives in this shot. You could get fancy and have an off camera flash to highligh the kids in the background, frozen, and crisp, and the time lapse flames in the foreground.
Actually, what am I saying? I would play with the on-camera flash some. There may be some good results. I do not know how the light of the flash would affect the color of the flames, but it is worth a little playing. Still, as in this excellent fire shot on a friend’s site, there are ways to use the fire light itself to light other subjects in the photo. It will just take some time to find that sweet spot at first.
And one obvious thing with this photo: the focus is off. The fire sparks should be more crisp. This kind of setting can really confuse a camera’s auto-focus. I would probably go to manual focus to make sure I had it right.
Speaking of, manual focus is one thing that really disappoints me on DSLRs. I have by no means shot all of them out there, but why did they get rid of the wonderful little split circle that worked so well in the manual focus days? Well, I think I could really launch off into a new post on that topic, so I will just leave the comments at that for now.
