fire photography part II: technique (non-flash portraiture)

12 min readAug 4, 2016

Here’s how I go about non-flash fire portraiture; your mileage may vary greatly. Photographers have lots of different styles; I personally try to balance crisp fire shapes with a focus on candid, expressive portraiture and motion. This is all junk I’ve just figured out by shooting often enough, and is by no means an exhaustive guide; I’d love to hear about your tricks and findings too.

For context, I’ve been practicing photography in general since 2008, and I started spinning and photographing fire at the beginning of 2016.

Part 1 of this post, on equipment, is here.
You can find my photo portfolio here and my videography here.

debugging fire photography

At the most recent fire jam, I took 533 candid shots and posted 27 of them: 5% yield. By comparison, my yield tends to be 20–35% in daylight conditions. Candid fire photography is annoying because you have to find the tiny intersection of good lighting conditions and good poses by people who are trying not to drop rapidly spinning flaming objects while also not scrunching up their faces in concentration.

However, my technique does not involve taking as many pictures as possible (burst mode sacrifices timing control on many camera bodies). Instead, I rely on situational awareness. Snap two or three photos at just the right instant when the fire is about to be placed in the optimum lighting position, and don’t even bother shooting when the light isn’t right, and you’ll save so much effort over burst mode, which actually reduces your range of options if you see an opening and want to wrest control back from your camera in a split second.

Here’s an overview of some frustrating factors that you just have to live with and learn awareness of when photographing fire:

Subject lighting

You are trying to take photos in the dead of night and the only source of illumination is a flaming object that is chaotically spinning around, and often behind, someone’s body. Even when there is enough light to see a face by, it is probably casting ghastly, unflattering directional shadows. I think fire portraits tend to turn out best when the wicks are within 1–2 feet of someone’s face, in a plane between their face and your camera.

Spinoffs, where people spin the excess fuel off their wicks at the beginning of the burn, are a great time to get well-illuminated photos with any prop because there will be a massive gout of flame. They are also prone to overexposure, so be ready to quickly ratchet your exposure down and then back up.

Dual props or props with more wicks give you more even lighting, so I gravitate toward those. Dragonstaffs can yield great portraits because they act as a natural ring light. Fans have many wicks and are one of the best props for portraiture because they’re usually held in front of the upper body in the perfect position to illuminate the face evenly, while dragonstaff moves are often prone to giving you winning shots of people’s armpits. If you see someone lighting up a dual prop with a lot of wicks, run over because you’ll get a lot of technically solid photos out of them, so you can relax and focus on capturing their personality.

Fire eating involves relatively small wicks, but allows for very tightly framed, precise shots since fire eaters are not changing position as much and the flame is always illuminating their faces.

Alice Ottesen w/ eating torches. Same lens as with the other shots, but since she’s standing still and her props are mostly held near her eye level, I was able to move in much closer to frame these shoulder-up portraits.

It can be difficult to capture people spinning small, fast-moving props, especially at full arm extension. By far the worst commonly used props for portrait illumination are poi and rope dart (incidentally, the two props I spin the most). On the other hand, their patterns look incredible with long-exposure flash shots, which I won’t be discussing here because I don’t specialize in that.

You can certainly get good photos with difficult props, but yield is very low since these props spend less time near the spinner’s face; rope darts spend most of their time at least 3 feet away. When you start you might be hitting the shutter button more or less randomly, but as you carefully observe more firespinners (or ideally, pick up flow arts yourself), you’ll build a vocabulary for what shootable situations to keep an eye peeled for — particularly when someone is about to execute a move that comes near their face.

The photo below is as illuminated as a dart photo will ever be because it’s a groundwork spinoff (lots of flame, close to face, bonus reflection from ground) and this person happens to use a massive wick that gives off tons of light. The vast majority of dart photos will have barely 10% of this light in a much worse lighting position.

People’s wicks typically only burn bright enough to create good portrait lighting for the first half of their burn, and a typical burn lasts for 3 to 5 minutes, so if you see someone getting ready to light up, run over and get them while they’re freshly lit, because you only have 90–180 seconds to get a well-illuminated shot. I don’t even bother continuing to shoot after the wicks have burned down halfway.

Fire shape vs. lighting

One thing you usually internalize about low-light photography is how to push your camera settings to give you as much light as possible without looking grainy. In fire photography, there are tradeoffs to pushing the settings.

More light sensitivity will make it easier to see your subjects’ faces, but it also makes the fire shape less distinctive and can drown details. Here’s a photo from the first fire jam I ever photographed in Jan 2016—some pretty cool stuff is happening in real life, but it’s overexposed in such a way that the light from the fire washes out the props and hands, which was definitely not my intent.

Underexposure can be mitigated in postprocessing, but information cannot be recovered from overexposure. By contrast, the first two photos in this post have more distinctive, dynamic flame shapes where the spinners’ features are emphasized and you can clearly see how the fire interacts with the wick.

Note also that past a basic threshold of "big enough sensor" and "settings can be controlled", better equipment is almost never the answer. This old photo was taken with the same camera body I use now, and in fact a significantly higher quality lens than the one I took all the rest of the photos in this article with. The lens I use for fire photography only cost $35, but it works because I extensively analyzed my shooting parameters and picked something situation-appropriate. All improvements since are due to technique.For more on assessing your equipment, head back to part I.

Flow face & timing

The absolute bane of every fire performer’s existence: flow face. When you are spinning large flaming objects around your body in complex patterns and trying not to get hit by them, it’s really damn hard to remember to smile, and you’ll probably have your eyes half shut, your mouth hanging open, and your chin scrunched up in half your photos.

There’s not a whole lot you can do about this from behind the camera, but having your subject’s attention definitely helps improve yield. People who are excited to pose can yield some awesome shots!

I also keep an eye peeled for people’s most flattering angles and move my camera around accordingly; there are always lots of half-blinking, chin-scrunched-up shots with great lighting and amazing fire shapes that just have to be dropped. Do not post these (unless they are sufficiently funny to qualify as a blooper and you have a very good relationship with the subject). Your first duty as a photographer is to the person in the portrait.

Framing

With tight framings as in the photo above, subjects can move out of frame in a split second. Practicing videography helps build a reflex for movement tracking. Familiarity with the spinners also helps since you can build reflex for their differing movement styles and flourishes.

If you watch people play with fire enough (or start spinning it yourself), you’ll build a reflex for how different props move and when they look good; for example, you see that fire eaters scan horizontally for the direction of the wind and lift a torch into a parabola when they’re about to put it in their mouth, or you’ll learn when poi are about to be brought into a pattern near someone’s face, where they’ll produce good portrait lighting.

Etiquette

Respect the burn. Do NOT surprise someone (with a camera flash, by sneaking up behind them, etc) while they are spinning fire. Do not crowd them with a camera unless they are specifically posing for you.
If someone does not seem receptive to being photographed, don’t do it.
If someone is looking in your direction, you can just point to your camera and get a nod. If they are too engrossed in their firespinning, don’t keep trying to get their attention; you can find them when they’re done.
When culling your photos, your photographer instinct may be to post the shots with the best technical portrait lighting and raddest fire shapes, but also please cull based on how flattering the photos are. “Flow face” is extremely common and most people do not want an unflattering facial expression posted no matter how technically good the shot is, unless it is hilarious enough to qualify as a blooper.

Collaborating

If your photos aren’t turning out well, you can see if someone is willing to pose for you — see if they are down to spin closer to their face or keep all their moves in front of their body for a bit to improve the lighting situation!

Photo consent

Do your best to get consent before you post images. This can be tricky if you’re at a particularly large fire jam and don’t know everyone. Here are a few of my tricks.

Run over to find someone you just photographed as they exit the burn field, show them your best snaps of them, and get their name.
Ask people who are idling around if they would like to be photographed.
Get their contact info or Facebook name and send them previews of the postprocessed images afterward.
You may not be the best judge of what someone perceives as an unflattering image of themselves, so after you’ve culled down to the objectively good shots, let them have the final say.

If you enjoy terminals, I have written a bash macro to quickly generate preview-size images to make it easier to quickly send someone a lot of images for a consent check.

There have been some larger events where I was unable to keep track and just posted the photos to the event asking if anyone knew who was in the photo. Most people are pretty excited to receive sweet photos of themselves spinning fire, but may be self-conscious about parts of their body or face that another person wouldn’t notice. I always include a note with photo albums saying that anyone can ask me to delete a photo of themselves if they don’t want it up.

Although many firespinners love performing and being photographed, remember that not everyone is there to be ogled; personally, I mostly just spin because it’s fun.

Settings

All of the technique above is somewhat subjective and takes practice to bake into reflexes. To get down to actual numbers:

ISO: Push this as high as you can without looking too grainy. On my full-frame Sony, I use ISO 4000. Others I’ve talked to prefer to shoot lower, like 1600, but it depends on your other parameters and lighting situation. On an APS-C camera, your max acceptable ISO is probably more like 2000.

Aperture: In part 1 of this post, I explained why a smaller aperture (a.k.a. higher f-stop) is actually ok for fire photography; people tend to move around so quickly that it’s hard to maintain focus with a DoF under 6 inches deep. Even though I own very low-light lenses, I get better results shooting around f/4–5.6 on my 135mm lens, and around f/2.8 on my 35mm lens.

Your ISO and f-stop constrain the rest of your settings. On my camera, the above settings and the movement of the flame mean that I can shoot crisp-looking fire shapes best at a shutter speed of about 1/400 to 1/640. Play around with it to figure out what works best for your equipment. Don’t just shoot blindly — inspect each successive shot and methodically change one parameter at a time until your shots look the way you want. The more you stop to question your technique, the faster you’ll get to where you want.

Position: As explained in part 1, I tend to shoot about 8–15 feet away from my subject. This constraint arises naturally from the fact that said subject is spinning a bunch of flaming objects around and I don’t want fire to bonk into my camera, nor do I want the subject to feel crowded.

Focusing: Manual action focusing is a huge pain and takes me at least 15 minutes to warm up to every jam, so my photos from the first few burns I shoot usually get thrown away. I use focus assist zoom to set my initial bearings. On the fly, I near-focus overshoot, quickly far-focus to the same level of blurriness, and then focus to what felt like halfway in between that in order to track the focus plane. Real pros probably rangefind or use autofocus or something.

Videography: Some cameras (looking at you, Nikon) re-meter and adjust exposure levels by default while you’re shooting video — make sure your auto-exposure is locked during videography, or it’ll look like your videos are flickering.

Shooting handheld: With fuel and props, I don’t have backpack space to bring a tripod to fire jams, so my videography and photography are handheld. I stabilize it by shooting from a low vantage point on the ground, bracing the camera against my body, and doing controlled pivots using my feet and knees to maintain three stabilization points. My setup and I are small and agile, so you’ll see me running around a lot to set up shots.

I prefer not to shoot RAW for normal daytime portraiture, but I always use RAW for fire.

RAW postprocessing

Photochop time! I don’t do much postprocessing for daylight photography, but it’s pretty essential for fire photography. The fire is very high-contrast with the rest of the image and tends to wash out features, so you have to alter the dynamic range to make it look realistic.

A lot of people assume that not too much postprocessing happens because my photo style is extremely naturalistic, but I have to do quite a lot of postprocessing on the RAW data to achieve the natural-feeling effect you see in the final photos.

Neil Johnson w/ torches. The unaltered image was overwhelmingly warm, so I postprocessed to add more color differentiation and crisp up the fire shapes. This visually delineates the props and fire from the subject. I also rotated it very subtly counterclockwise to emphasize the stability of the pose and cropped it slightly tighter to emphasize the feeling that the torches were about to fly out of the frame (which they were indeed doing in real life).

White balance: fire makes photos look a lot warmer than real life, so I tend to tweak this pretty heavily toward the cool spectrum to bring out the blues of the hot flame closest to the wick.

Clarity is that setting that makes HDR cloud photos look fake. But it makes fire look crisp and closer to how your eyes originally perceived the scene! (Human eyes are a lot better at dynamic range than camera sensors.) You can crank this setting very far up for fire alone, but if you go too far, humans may look unnaturally CGI, grainy, or grimy (firespinners are covered in soot marks), so it really depends on the shot and your style. Sometimes if there’s a lot of skin in an image, I even lower Clarity to soften it.

Highlights can be brought down a little to get more distinctive fire shapes and pull more detail out of overexposed areas, reducing ambient glow. If you bring them down too far, the fire starts to look CGI, which I personally avoid, though some people enjoy this effect.

Shadows can be brought up a little to even out illumination differences. If you bring them up too far, the shadowed areas look grainy, since less light information was captured about them.

Dirty tricks: even with the most paranoid of focusing, it’s easy for dancers to slip out of your focus plane. I will often brush their eyes with the sharpening brush to make them seem more in focus. Yes, it’s cheating, but I’m compensating for the setback of manual focus ;p

Crop: I make an effort to shoot so that minimal to no framing adjustment is necessary in postprocessing, but will often crop slightly tighter to make movement feel bigger and more dynamic. I will also often slightly rotate images (a degree or less) to create tension, emphasize certain movement lines, or change the perception of motion, falling, or stability in an image.

I’ve never gotten around to installing Adobe Lightroom for reasons that can only be ascribed to habit and sheer laziness around workflow changes. Literally every other photographer in the world will tell you to use Lightroom, so you should probably check it out.

That’s about it; have fun, don’t let any loose fire props collide with your camera, and I’d love to hear feedback or about how you achieve differing photography styles. One day maybe I’ll actually bring a tripod to a jam and try some long-exposure dart selfies.