When Things Start to Heat Up {Fire Photography}
If you've been following our work you might remember some fire photography we did several months ago. We really had fun with this, and want to do more of it soon. It's been interesting the response we have gotten from everyone who has seen the work. They want to know what we did to create the look we got. We have spent a lot of time explaining it to those who were interested in knowing more, and decided to go ahead and write a blog post about it. I want to take the time to go into some of the details behind the images, and what it took to create them. It's not often that you get a behind the scenes look at what really goes on prior to the final image. I'm not really going to cover technical stuff in this post or even the retouching process. Mainly I want to focus on our DIY project that took place before the shooting even took place. It's fun to see these projects every now and then, and this one is a fun one to cover.
We had been looking at a lot of different photographers that do photography that involves fire. The concept caught our eye, and made us want to take a stab at it. The first thing we had to figure out was how to do this safely. Safety is very important, so we didn't want to risk hurting ourselves or damaging anything. Doing this in the middle of winter when the snow had just melted was one way to keep from having to worry about a grass fire, etc. That took care of one problem. The next was how to keep ourselves relatively safe. The best way to do this, was to just take extra precautions and use common sense. After the obvious, Don came up with the idea to make a wire cage to hold the wick in that would allow us to spin the fire. The wire cage is attached to a wooden broom handle, so we're able to spin the wire cage with the flame inside. In a nutshell, he bent some wire into a cage to hold the wick. For a wick, we used old clothing that we no longer wear and douse it in fuel. Since we use a liquid fuel to douse the wick in, we let it sit drip for a little while to keep from having it slung everywhere while spinning the cage. Once we ignight the wick we're ready to go.