Newsgroups: rec.photo
From: acs@csri.toronto.edu (Alvin Chia-Hua Shih)
Subject: Re: How do you photograph fire?
Keywords: fire
Date: 26 Dec 92 12:39:50 GMT

In <1992Dec22.150149.19462@cs.mun.ca> michael9@nadine.cs.mun.ca (Michael Sullivan) writes:


>  Here in my city we've just had one of the biggest fires in fifty years.  I
>happened to be in the area, and had my camera with me.  Unfortunatly, I
>only had half a roll of 100 print film left, no tripod, and extream winds. :-(

>  Anyway, how should fire be photographed in order to preserve the look and
>color of the flames, while still getting some background?  It seems to me
>that when I develop the roll I'm going to find that I'll either have pictures
>with lots of flames and no background, or pictures with background and a 
>big white/yellow spot where the flames are.

This would be my guess too.

>  Is it just a matter of doing some extream bracketing?

Something like that.

It's a tough situation.  To get enough exposure for the background, you
need a relatively low shutter speed.  And without a tripod, things will
be probably not turn out to be very sharp.  (I've been tempted to get
one of those "tabletop 'pods" for just such emergencies.)  Plus the
dynamic nature of the flames in the wind isn't helpful either.

I tried to get some pictures of the local oil refinery when there
were flames shooting out of one of the stacks at night.  The sky
was glowing from the light of the flames.

I was shooting from about a mile away.  Wide open with my little zoom
lens (around f/4, say), I had to keep the shutter open for about 10
seconds with Ektar 100.  Of course I lost some to reciprocity, but
turns out that it kept things looking like night rather than day, so it
wasn't so bad.

I metered off the sky near the flames where the colour was most
interesting.  The colour of the flames is washed out towards white, but
the rest of the sky came out with a nice orange glow.  Personally,
I found the overall effect pleasing, but the flames were only a small
part of the picture.

In your case, if you could somehow crop the scene to something
interesting with the flames as a source of illumination (firefighter,
distraught people, burning structure, etc.), you might have been able
to get an interesting shot.  With people pictures, fill flash would
help. (Though I suppose you'd look awfully insensitive...)

Without flash, I'd do "subject bracketing" by metering the flames and
opening up 2 stops (for print film) and taking the shot, and then
metering something close by that was illuminated by the flames (if the
flames were really that omnipresent) to try to capture the "warm"
(pun?) quality of the light.  Then I'd wait and see (as you are
doing).

Try to stop down just a little bit so that highlights (street lights,
or whatever is holding still for too long) have an interesting star
shape as opposed to being washed-out blobs.

So, in summary, with no tripod and slow film (and maybe slow glass,
like I have...), you were definitely stuck.

Hope that helps.

ACS
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