My favourite annual festival is bonfire night. It's an event which knows exactly what it is, hasn't really been corrupted by commercial interests (cough Christmas) and is very local - that is, it's done at a village level and keeps its small-scale feel. It also comes with fireworks and a bonfire. I love it.
Every year I look forward to heading to my parents' village for their event (living in a historic city, there isn't much taste for huge pillars of fire ... go figure) and every year I take a load of pictures of the bonfire, trying to capture the flickering tongues, the heat and the evocative nature of a pile of burning wood in the dark.
This year, we had the fun of the bonfire going up rather quicker than expected resulting in a huge cloud of steam and smoke washing over the crowd then a fireball which was gloriously hot before the marshals hurriedly made us retreat, pushing back the safety rope.
For the photos, I tried a variety of approaches. I wanted to capture the moving tongues, so shooting a fast moving target, but it was all at night so I needed to be mindful of light capture. This year I got best results with a high shutter speed, to freeze the movement, and then countered the limited light by pushing the ISO up to very high levels to pick up everything I could. Obviously the flash was of no use and there was only so much I could do with a wide aperture.
I was pretty pleased with the results, and I always enjoy the technical exercise of trying to figure out how to set up the camera to take these shots as effectively as I can.
I also took a few with my phone, which went with a similarly fast shutter, but instead of pushing the sensitivity just applied AI and fixed it up in post. I think. Pixel photos are somewhat magic.
Anyway, here are the results:
And if you're interested, this is last year:
Which was set up in a similar way, although using less of the extreme settings.
Maybe one day I'll figure out how to capture fireworks.
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