I'm a Pyro!

Hey!! I haven't talked to you guys in forever how have you been? Well I've been pretty good and it's been a good year so far, especially in photography! About a few weeks ago, Bennett Barbosa (a.k.a Barbosa Media Co.) and I went out for a little photo shoot! Of course, Bennett and I aren't generally the modeling type, but for this kind of modeling we weren't the focus. This modeling also included moving a dog leash continually as fast as you could. Now this doesn't sound like a normal type of photo shoot does it? Well it definitely wasn't....

What Bennett and I found on the Internet was something quite out of the ordinary. This project was similar to our previous light painting (look to my long exposure post), but this project was with fire. So basically, we lit some stuff on fire and spun it around on a leash for around thirty seconds. This was a really fun project, although there were a few hazards that came with the cool shots.

This was a very fun project, so I'll describe how we did it and what we used to make such a cool and fun photog project. So like I said, I found this project just searching for interesting photo ideas, and when I first saw it, I was perplexed as well as very interested; so I decided to research it and possibly attempt to take some photos like that. It ended up to be less complicated than I had originally thought. So here were the main 'ingredients' that were necessary for success in this photo shoot: a decent camera,  a tripod, some steel wool (preferably a 00 grade or lower), a dog leash/rope, a whisk (yes, the kitchen utensil), some matches and a place that won't explode in flames once the sparks begin to fly. Another smart idea is to wear clothes that won't be singed easily, because sparks do fly right onto you once you begin twirling the lit wool. So after Bennett and acquired all of this supplies, we headed out to the White Barn near St. Mary's to shoot. We left my house around 8:30, because it was starting to get pretty dark by that time. Once we got to the White Barn, we didn't know where to actually shoot these photos, because if we did them too close to the White Barn we'd scorch a historic part of Park City. So we decided it'd be better to do it off to the side, where a ton of dry grass was (good idea, right?). Luckily we still had a little snow at that point, so we could easily put out a fire if it were to ignite the grass. So once we found our spot, we decided that it was still a little too bright to try and shoot. So 45 minutes later we decided to try it out. It was an awkward thing to do, and it was REALLY hard to ignite the steel wool with matches when your fingers were completely numb from the cold. So we tried it, and the first attempt came out exactly how we wanted it to. We weren't expecting the first attempt of this experiment to come out how we wanted it but it did.

My first time to ever model...

After that first success I wanted to take a picture of Bennett. I told him to try a different arc path with the dog leash, and he ended up making an insanely cool one. This attempt was much cooler than mine, although it was all because of the arc, and you know, my skills ;) . But anyways, we only got the chance to take two other photos, and they didn't turn out too well. So in the end, we learned a ton about how to take those types of photos but also had lots of fun taking them.

My photo of Bennett-- These were like fireworks...