Philadelphia Fire Arts, July and October 2007

I arrived at the PEX warehouse early on an evening in July. It’s a great location to shoot, plenty of makeshift studio space and fire is allowed! Where else could I find an indoor location where the freedom to burn is one of the allowances? I also felt safe since the performers take their craft and its safety precautions quite seriously.

With those concerns out of the way I concentrated the set up. The performance area can also be viewed from an overlook on the second floor, a perfect spot to setup an accent light — a Dynalite flash head inside a large octagon softbox. For this shoot one light will do.
I planned to use it as an accent lite whenever the
performers moved into its range.

I had never shot fire performance before and had no idea what to expect regarding the shooting conditions. I also made sure to tune out references to the many fire photos I had seen online. I wanted to be completely free from influence when I began to make these images.

The performer’s warmups were over, the music was cranked even higher and they began to light up. In about three hours I shot close to 1200 images. It was the most difficult shoot I have ever had in 20 years as a professional. The room lights were off so manual focusing was difficult, the performers were always in motion and hard to follow-focus, the intensity of the flames changed as the fuels used during each performers’ set burned off and since each performed with different items, staff, poi, etc., the light from the flames varied greatly. Manual exposure was the only option. I had to constantly adjust to capture the right blend of motion and details in the flames.

I was also working without an assistant and I had to dump the RAW files I was shooting onto my laptop and to a backup external harddrive each time the performers took a break.

The second shoot was in October and I captured another 800 images in a few hours. I wanted a different look from the July shoot so I changed the lighting from a large overhead diffuse light source to a harsh, narrow spotlight at ground level.

Here is a gallery of images from the July and October photo sessions.

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