(c) Roger Overall 2009 - www.rogeroverall.net
In early March, I was commissioned to photograph a fire walking event for EMC, who in turn had hired Brian Moore of Peak Potential to run the seminar here in Cork.
My job was to produce memento photographs for the participants as they walked the 22ft stretch of hot coals. Sounds easy, but there was a technical issue to resolve. Direct flash turns hot coals grey rather than leaving them a nice burning orange. In the past, EMC photographers have overcome this by adding the coals in post-production. As a documentary photographer, I wanted to see if I could produce a lighting plan that showed the real achievement of the firewalkers. No artificial additives.
My first stop was to speak to one of the photographers who had already worked with EMC to find out more about how a fire walk shoot goes and to talk lighting. Huge thanks to Daniel McQuaid, a colleague based in the US, who had never heard of me but took the best part of an hour out of his day to chat to me when I rang. Photographers lead an isolated existence (a bit like panda bears but with better reproduction stats), but thanks to modern comms technology it’s easy to get the help you need, provided the other person is willing to give. Dan is a giver and I’m very grateful.
After speaking with Dan, I did a lighting trial run with Brian about seven weeks before the EMC shoot. You can read about that here: Walking On Fire. While the trial was a success in terms of exposing the problems I’d face, the pictures weren’t anything near what I wanted to deliver to EMC. I was going to have to address a bunch of challenges, all of which were interlinked, rather than just a single one.
My first problem was focus. High-end autofocus is pretty good these days, but it can be hit and miss in dark situations. Similarly, manual focus on people moving with urgency over hot coals wasn’t going to be an option. We’d have to go old school on this. Set the lens to focus on a particular point, lock it down, and shoot. I improved the range within which the walkers would be in focus by using a small aperture. In effect, nearly all of the bed of coals was in focus, allowing me to pop off four our five photographs per participant, which would help with blinkers.
First problem solved, but that created two new problems of its own.
New problem 1: A small aperture means I need either a lot more off-camera light to expose the walkers correctly or a very high sensitivity in the camera. Increasing the light during the exposure by extending the shutter time was out, simply because the exposure time necessary would render the walkers blurry and overexpose the coals themselves. I’d already seen how bad that looked during the trial. Pumping out more light on to the firewalkers was possible, but limited by the power of the small flashguns I use. That left increasing the camera’s sensitivity to light. Fortunately, high-end cameras deliver low-light performance in spades these days and my newest camera is mind-boggling in that regard. I dialed in ISO 3,200 and we were good to go.
That left new problem 2: Though it was great to be able to capture four or five pictures as each participant walked the coals in terms of focus, I’d need my flash to charge and fire rapidly. That meant keeping its power output for each shot down around 1/8th of its capacity. At those levels, the flash can just pop-pop-pop. But that means you need to make the most use of the reduced light that’s coming out of the flash. That was already sorted with the high ISO setting. However, it also means the communication between camera and flash needs to be fast. Here I hit a snag. My radio controlled setup turned out not to be quick enough. I could get two frames fired in the time available to me, but not the four or five I wanted. The camera, radio trigger and flash receiver couldn’t talk to each other quickly enough.
The solution was to use a dedicated infra-red device that is built by my camera and flash manufacturer. Tests showed a 100% hit rate. Five flashes in quick succession. Great.
But I immediately ran into another problem. Infrared works on line of sight and the way the flash was going to be positioned, that wasn’t going to be possible. Unless I rotated the flash body around on its axis – bit light an owl’s head – so that the sensor at the front was facing back at the sensor on the camera. Fortunately, the heads on my flashguns can go 360 degrees, so this hurdle was quickly overcome.
So, I had the focus down, the exposure issues resolved, and the flash talking at bullet speed with the camera.
That just left the biggie: how to control the light so that it lit the firewalkers but not the coals they were walking on. In the end, the solution was straightforward. A home-made grid spot fashioned from duck tape, cardboard and half a dozen black straws liberated from a juice bar at Sydney airport did the trick. This kind of DIY approach to lighting modification is peculiar to a segment of the photographic community centred around a messiah who is aptly named David Hobby. The grid spot meant I could direct a small rectangle of light exactly where I wanted it; in this case the firewalker from the waist up.
The results were exactly what I’d hoped to produce for EMC at the outset.
So, no trickery in Photoshop at all?
I won’t lie to you.
In most instances, I increased the exposure on the legs of the firewalkers in post-production to give a more even and natural look to the photograph.
And, yes, I did enhance the coals in a few of the images, particularly those taken at the end of the walk, when a dozen or so people had already walked and some of the embers had lost a bit of their pep. They were still very hot (Brian commented that the firewood was of such high quality it was the hottest walk he’d ever organized), so the participant’s achievement wasn’t diminished, but the pictures lacked a little drama compared with the photographs of the initial walkers. So I tweaked them a bit to better reflect the walker’s own experience.
Fundamentally, though, I was happy I achieved what I had set out to do: devise a lighting scheme that would show the coals as they were rather than washing them out with a flood of light.
Incidentally, want to know what it feels like when you’ve overcome your fears to walk those coals?
(c) Roger Overall 2009 - www.rogeroverall.net
Of course, if Brian is running the seminar, you’ve already done this :
(c) Roger Overall - www.rogeroverall.net
This:
(c) Roger Overall 2009 - www.rogeroverall.net
And this:
(c) Roger Overall 2009 - www.rogeroverall.net
That’s an 8mm iron bar and these ladies aren’t bending it with their hands. They are using only their throats. The hands are there to stop the bar from slipping and cutting them.
