So, last weekend I had the privilege of shooting the Ignight Fire and Flow Festival, held at Joshua Tree Lakes campground in Southern California. This was an epic weekend. I attended the festival last year as both a medical volunteer and participant, and was eagerly looking forward to this year's event. Last year, I had to pretty much be on call the whole weekend since it was close to the birth of the corporate mascot, but I went to a lot of workshops and had a blast. At that point I was still waiting for the D3200 I had ordered and was just preparing to dive back in to the world of photography. This year I was really looking forward to not only taking more workshops and learning some new things from the masters, but also getting the chance to spend several nights shooting away and experimenting with different ways of shooting fire performers. Then news got even better when I found out it would be a new moon, which meant it would be dark and far enough away from city lights to take a stab at shooting some of my first star trails.
Got in on Thursday afternoon, set up camp, had dinner, then did my first star trail attempt. Left the camera shooting for three hours, only to find out in the morning that I had confused interval and time lapse modes, so I had a 30 second movie instead of 300+ images to stack into trails. Ooops.
Friday morning started with bacon and mimosas, then I headed off to get some massive learning started. Good thing I had the camera to turn to, because during my first workshop it quickly became obvious that some trapeze damage to my left shoulder and back (i.e.- those muscles basically took the impact of a bad landing and sacrificed them selves to keep me from literally breaking my neck) wasn't as healed as I thought it was, so I was at a flow conference and unable to spin. (well, I could as long as I didn't do anything that required bringing my left arm above shoulder level...) I found some really awesome massage practitioners who worked on me, and it did help a lot, but between the injury residue and the insane heat, I wasn't able to spin much at all without my muscles totally locking up, so I got to spend even more time than I planned concentrating on photography.
I mentioned the heat in the quick post, but it was brutal enough that it deserves a second mention. It was freaking hot. So hot that even if the camera was in the bag, left in the shade, it would be almost too hot to touch after about ten minutes. If it was dangling from the strap in open sunlight, it was more like 2 minutes and it was almost hot enough to require gloves to handle. Having read a lot about sensor heating while researching for star trails, as well as having had iphones, watches and other gadgets shut down from heat when I was racing triathlons, I was really worried about the camera overheating, but neither the D4 nor the D3200 had any obvious issues with the temperature besides being hot to the touch. My initial plan was to use the D3200 as my daytime walk around camera, because it was much lighter and has higher resolution, but I hadn't taken one key limitation into account. I was mostly shooting people, which meant even though it was insanely bright outside, I still wanted to shoot wide open on my lenses to isolate my subjects and needed to use fill flash to counteract the very hard mid day sunlight. After about a half hour walking around on Friday i realized that the D3200 is not capable of using auto FP high speed sync, thus I was not able to shoot at anything faster than 1/200 second. Since I didn't have any neutral density filters with me, this meant I couldn't shoot wide apertures to get the shallow depth of field I wanted for my shots. So I had to pull out Excalibur even for the daytime stuff, so I could use fill flash wide open at the shutter speeds necessary to make it all work.
The heat actually wound up sort of introducing me to some of my best shots. I saw another photographer who was looking pretty beat down by the heat, brought him to the trailer for some AC, soda an a popsicle to cool him off. Hanging out with him and his girlfriend led to meeting Mystic and Maya and getting to shoot their Sensual Movement workshop, which was one of my favorite sets of the weekend. They were both beautiful, sensual, incredible women who were trying to show that anyone could be sexy, and that is something I truly believe. This may be hard for some people to digest, but sexy has absolutely nothing to do with a person's physical looks. I have seen many people that had supermodel looks, but were not at all sexy because of some personality issue, usually stemming from lack of self confidence. Conversely, I have known some people who, despite not being what society in general would call "hot" are the most incredibly sexy people I know simply because of how they carry themselves. I am deliberately trying to avoid using gender specific pronouns, because- while I am hetero(flexible) and thus tend to focus on the ladies, the workshop also had its' complement of totally sexy guys as well. The workshop, besides being photographic gold, was amazing to watch because I think everyone that took part in it, male or female, young or old, left with a little more self confidence than they came in with, and was a bit more able to believe that they could be sexy. I felt very honored that all the participants allowed me to shoot the workshop and to be a part of that wonderful energy.
Later on that evening it was time to shoot the opening ceremony- after a wonderfully beautiful golden hour that I only got to slightly enjoy because I had to at least pay some attention to the fire safety brief I was attending at the time. I found a good spot on top of the DJ booth/Bugaloo Bus, slapped on the 70-200 and waiting for it to start. The opening ceremony this year was epic, got some great shots,
missed several more because I was laughing too hard to focus.
It was basically Disney presents a fire festival..... some great songs from the little mermaid, beauty and the beast, and other disney stories set to fire dance. In short it was AWESOME!
After the opening, I went to grab some dinner, then decided I was too tired to head back out, so I set the camera up for another shot at star trails and went to bed. This time it worked.
Not the best star trail shot out there, but I'll take it as the first real effort at it with the right camera mode and settings. May have to make a special trip out to the deep desert to do some more of these, especially once I get a wide angle lens.
Saturday again started with bacon and mimosas, then it was out to wander the festival and see what there was to shoot, and also play a little with the acro yoga workshop because my shoulder was ok for most of that. Got some really awesome massage work done on my shoulder thanks to a couple of very awesome therapists, so I decided to hit the knife throwing and archery workshops, not only to play a little with sharp objects but also to give the continuous high speed shutter a serious workout. Already posted about how well that worked out so won't recap here.
One of the organizers asked me to shoot some shots of the merchants that they could use as PR for other merchants, so tried to get a little that would fit that. Not really sure I nailed that request, but hopefully there will be something they can use. But as I was doing laps of the lake waiting for fun stuff in the merch booths, I saw a great couple and got one of my favorite shots from the weekend.
Then it was time for fire photography lab. Spent the rest of Saturday night at the fire circle just shooting away and trying different settings, speeds, etc. I wound up shooting all ambient light, for a couple of reasons. Part of it was I didn't want to break anyone's flow up and annoy them with flashes in their face when I hadn't talked to them about it first. But mostly it was pure laziness. I didn't feel like putting up stands, setting up the remotes, then moving them around every time I wanted to shoot from a different angle. I also figured there would be enough for me to learn without adding the extra complication. I have done a few tries to use flash to capture a still spinner and still get long exposure trails without getting one that I can say nailed it, but when I do that I think I want to actually set up somewhere and get someone to spin just for me to shoot in a controlled environment until I get enough of a feel for it to try it in the wild on that scale. But mostly, it was just me being lazy. Still, I managed to learn a lot.
For instance- timing is very important for lots of reasons. Even without the flash to stop motion, if I saw a good moment where the spinner was basically still and just moving the tools, I was able to get a decent combo of still spinner with good trails with just ambient light. 1/10 sec seemed to be the magic number for me to do this.
I also found that shooting smaller apertures gave much better images of the flames, but I was amazed at how much variety of light levels different tools put out. Really small fire wouldn't give enough ambient light to really see the spinner with smaller apertures, or even wide open unless I waited until the tool happened to be right in front of the face giving good illumination. For example, this was shot wide open at 1/50 sec f2.8. (iso 500)
Some bigger tools, on the other hand, threw out a massive amount of light. This shot was 1/30 sec, F22. (iso 12,800) No, I didn't miss a decimal place there. I meant F22.
Often, there were so many spinners going simultaneously that the circle was actually very well lit, This one was 1/30 Sec F2.8 (ISO 1800)
Heh, guess that goes to show how quickly I have become spoiled by Excalibur's capabilities in low light, I just called an ISO 1800 shot well lit. Guess that is also a reflection of my typical shooting environment. Actually, as I go back over my pics really looking into settings, I think next time I shoot fire like this I will turn off the auto ISO functionality so I can really see what the light is doing without the camera brain compensating so much. I really love not having to worry about ISO, but don't want to get too used to relying on the crutch.
I also learned that the smoke haze from a large group of spinners will effect shots, making them look hazy, but 9 times out of 10 I was able to fix that, or at least reduce it significantly by bumping up the black point in post.
So, overall, it was hot, very very very hot. I was a bit bummed about my shoulder and not getting to really play in any of the workshops, but that was more than made up for by the chance to really spend a weekend shooting and experimenting, and meeting so many awesome (and very photogenic) people.
You can see my full galleries from the weekend at this link, but I will leave you with one last image. This martial artists broke a stack of flaming bricks. It was pretty freaking epic and definitely captured the spirit of awesomeness that permeated the weekend. Glad I was in the right place at the right time to shoot this.
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