Exploring with my camera Saturday night at this weekend’s Whole Earth Festival, I discovered that fire dancing is a lot more difficult to capture than I expected.
While the background was extremely dark, the sporadic burst of flames caused my camera’s light meter to fluctuate wildly, making it hard for me to determine which settings I needed to correctly expose the image. As a result, I shot at a wide-open aperture of f/1.8 to let as much light in as I could. I also increased the light sensitivity by using a higher ISO of 1000. With these settings – and the right timing – I was able to capture the burst of flame at a shutter speed of 1/125 of a second. Without the help of a flash, it was difficult to coordinate all of the right settings and ignore my light meter. Sometimes you have to trust yourself and not always listen to what your camera tells you to do.
– Jasna Hodzic
