As a photographer I’m always trying to push myself and find new creative ideas.  A friend of mine sent me a link to a shoot idea.  Trying to recreate a photo shoot is always a lot of fun and a learning experience.
Being winter in Michigan we decided to use my apartment for the shoot.  It is very difficult to find sparklers in Michigan in February.  Luckily my friend knew someone who works for a fireworks manufacturer and was able to get some.  We had one box of normal sparklers, 2 backs of large neon sparklers and 2 boxes of very large sparklers.  After setting up the lighting and taking a few test shots it was time to play with fire.  The normal sparklers were cool and we got some nice shots.  It was difficult to get the model to no move for the long exposures we were shooting at.  Later in the shoot we had her sit on the edge of a chair and probably should have done this for the entire shoot.
So after playing around with the regular stuff it was time to get out the big guns.  The large neon sparklers were bright.  We had to jack up the f-stop and increase the strobes to compensate.  Because of the amount of sparks we were afraid the carpet was going to burn so I got a towel from the bathroom.  Good thing we got the towel.  The falling sparks actually put a burn spot on the towel.  The apartment filled up with smoke and we had to turn on a bunch of fans and open the window to try to clear it out.  Just a note – already thinking of the smoke I had removed the battery from the smoke detector before the shoot.
For a first time we got some good shots but not exactly what I was hoping for.  I look forward to doing this shoot again and expanding on what we learned from this one.  If you live in Saginaw MI and looking to put together a modeling portfolio.

You may also like

Back to Top