I realize this comes a little late considering this past week the workshop ended but i wanted to post it none the less. The final shoot was with our good friend Paul. Paul is the best fire dancer on the islands. A title that he has worked to achieve and has the scars to prove it. Literally! His arms and legs are covered with burns and cuts from the devices he dances with. The impressive thing, besides the fact that he does this, is he taught himself how to do this kind of dancing. Impressive.
Before we photographed Paul we waited and putz’d along the beach. The best time to do the shoot was of course at dusk where the light from the flame would be more dramatic against the dark background. This being said the shoot itself was quite difficult to manage with thirty of us. Dad and Rc orchestrated it so that manual flash users would be together and TTL guys would be together. This way if anyone needed help in theory the guy next to him would be able to help. Now of course there was a settings setup before the torches were lit which also helped. As for myself i helped Dad by holding a single flash, operated by a Pocket Wizard, on a paint pole with an EZY Box. This was no easy feet. The wind kept blowing the EZY Box off making it difficult to hold. Plus with the fire i was worried the box would fly into Paul and we would have a disaster.
As you can see from the shots above the differences between using flash and not using flash. Without flash the best bet was to go off the ambient light from the torches, increasing the ISO to around 1600 which is fine on the D3, and decreasing exposure compensation to -2. It worked most of the time producing some interesting results. Dad, Kevin and myself traded time with the flash so that we could all get some good shots. The shoot ended great, everyone got at least one shoot which is the whole point. It was the perfect way to end the workshop.
Images captured with Nikon D3, AF-S 24-70, on Lexar UDMA Digital Film