The past couple weeks have been filled with lots of work and tedious amounts of unsatisfying boredom. It all began when we moved the studio from our original location to our much more modern studio clear across town all in the course of a day or two. All the paperwork and phone calls involved in moving are just plain blah. Because of all this extra work I’ve tried to fill my late evenings with good friends and good times. I’ve been very successful spending the evening with friends like Dan Miller, our amazing hair stylist, and his fiance Josie, our amazing makeup artist, and I couldn’t forget the wonderful Miss Sara. This blend of unfun and good times has done wonders for my morale and also for my own personal photography.

Yesterday was an amazing day filled with one wedding consultation, a lunch and a walk in the park with Miss Sara and then an evening with Dan, Josie, Jose, Eric and Schnell sitting outside in front of a giant bonfire. I’m a sucker for fire and even more so when that fire is grand in scale so this evening was even more amazing than most. What should have been a quick burn and shot evening of beers and good laughs turned out to an evening filled with photography, side-splitting laughter, drunken voicemails to Sara (not by me as I was quite sober), 2nd degree burns and plenty of random craziness. I won’t go into too much detail about the things you don’t want to know about so let’s skip right to the photography!

I’ve photographed fire in the past, but had yet to do anything serious with it. This night I decided I would try to get some shots to at least replace the wallpaper on my computer and maybe share with friends. Knowing that I’ve never really tried this before I knew there would be a small amount of trial and error, which is fine because learning new things is what drives me to get better at photography as a whole. I ended up finding a good mixture of depth of field, shutter speed and film speed that left me clean imagery with the emotional fierceness that fire provides.

This fire itself has a special property that makes it somewhat difficult to capture which stems from the fact that fire is alive. Fire moves, breathes and changes direction without any warning. This movement means that you just can’t lock in a super slow shutter speed, place your camera on a tripod and hope for great imagery. Hence why everyone with a cellphone camera last night ended up with pure garbage no matter how man millions of pixels they told me they had. Side note: cell phone cameras, no matter the pixel count, are not great tools unless they are measured in pure convenience; end of rant. I ended up using a settings mixture of ISO 1600+, f2 and a shutter speed around 1/60th. The confusing part about those settings is the fact that when you’re standing next to a fire that encompasses a 10 foot circle it seems amazingly bright. Sadly our eyes have the ability to adjust to the conditions around us and the brightness is a farce and our cameras can’t bend the rules so they have to be adjusted to the true amount of light that is emitted by the flames.

With these settings I went for the details of the fire that I found the most interesting. In my opinion the glowing of the red embers truly amazes me especially on a windy day when they seem to glow with an almost inorganic feel; like LED’s flickering and changing saturation and color to a certain pattern. I stood as close to the fire as I could withstand and captured a lot of detail shots that show the texture of the battered wood and its fierce red glow. From there I timed the crackling of the wood and the spent moisture shooting streaks of hot embers into the night air. Following that I had to capture one image with Schnel, our friendly viking, tending the fire.

All in all this was a wonderful experience photographically, but never as much as the true experience spending the evening with great friends. I personally can’t wait to see what happens on our next adventure and hopefully I’ll return here to bring you all more images and stories.