spitting fire
Vincent spitting fire during last week's fire light painting photo session!
We organized a little light painting evening with fire last week. We had 3 jugglers (including one fire spitter) and 3 photographers, all equipped with SLRs and tripods.
The idea of the evening was to do some light painting with fire.
Benoit, Julian and myself were taking photos, and Olivier, JB and Vincent were juggling. The evening was really nice, we spent 2 hours shooting in different configurations, we had some really nice results as well. The thing with fire is that you don't control it as much as normal flash lights when doing light painting, so the pictures are a bit less prepared than our previous light painting experiments. But the texture of the fire is really really cool.
This one is not a light painting photo per say cause the exposure time was around 1/1000th of a second only in order to freeze the fire shot in the air.
But we did many photos that lasted around 5 to 30 seconds depending on what we wanted to achieve. I've posted another one to show the kind of things we did.
Quite happy with how things turned out, we all had fun and went away with fairly nice photos, next time I'd like to try and "build" scenes a little more, perhaps with several light sources.

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Uploaded on Jul 19, 2009
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night juggling
A short stop motion movie showing JB juggling with fire. You can check out more videos of JB (aka JiBe) on his passingDB website.

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Uploaded on Jul 19, 2009
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fire reflecting in water
Olivier juggling with light, in the water.
We organized a little light painting evening with fire last week. We had 3 jugglers (including one fire spitter) and 3 photographers, all equipped with SLRs and tripods.
The idea of the evening was to do some light painting with fire.

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Uploaded on Jul 19, 2009
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water drops
(strobist info: 1 flash remotly triggered, 1/16th power, straight at the scene from below the camera and reflected off a white sheet of paper placed behind the scene).
This is my very first experiment at capturing water drops.
I know this kind of shots is so "cliché" but I guess it's something you have to try out for yourself at one stage anyway.
It was a good timing though cause this great article on Strobist came up a few weeks ago and I just got a new lens: Sigma 70-200mm f2.8, so it was the perfect excuse to play with it (of course I also tested the lens on portrait shots as well, I didn't buy it just to shoot water drops ...)
So anyway, getting this type of picture is not thaaat simple, you need a little bit of equipment, at least a flash that can be triggered remotly. Maybe you can do it without a flash but you'll need another light source and a pretty powerful one as well.
The main idea here is to have a source of water somewhere above that lets drops go at a steady rate and always at the same exact place so that you can focus once and be done with it (after focusing, you can then just put the lens in manual focus mode and it won't try to re-adjust every time).
For this one as well, I took the opportunity to try out a setup I learned about a few days ago: shooting tethered! If you don't know what that means, it's just plugging the camera to a cable that goes to the computer and viewing photos directly on the big screen instead of struggling to see if things are in focus on the damn small LCD screen on the back of the camera. It was especially good for this kind of exercise and also because my good old canon 350D really has a small screen on its back, so you can't really make out if the tiny drops of water are in focus or not.
I think I've shot something like 200 photos tonight of water drops alone. I kept around 80 only, the other 120 were just plain crap, and on top of these 80, I've selected only 6 that are really worth sharing.
So, here is a first one, I don't know if I'll post the other ones or not, we'll see...
Check out my blog for an explanation of the setup and other photos.
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Uploaded on Jul 7, 2009
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the universe is a spiraling big bang
I have to admit I was feeling a bit notious after taking this photo and the series of many shots along with this one. Probably because I did it by keeping the light in front of me and turning really fast.
After some photos I really was starting to feel my stomach wanting to go back up...
But, hey, it was worth the try, right?
I don't have to tell you that of course, it looks better large and on black

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Uploaded on Jul 3, 2009
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