Belly Dances with Fire

[CLKunst]

My friend, giving me a moment in front of the bonfire before she began her performance for the evening. Your thoughts?

Shot RAW
ISO 200
1/30
Off camera flash

[CLKunst]

And one more of her going full tilt.

[GB1]

CL - Well, I liked the other fire shots a little better. What's with this woman's makeup? Too much Anyways, it seems a bit too dark on the left side and angle she's twisting at makes it hard to tell what's going on. I guess it's a little annoying in that respect.

The top shot, I had to look at it a few times to understand what's happening. (Maybe I'm clueless?) It's a bit too discrete perhaps..

GB

[CLKunst]

Hmmmm... perhaps I should have been more specific. She's a belly dancer, not a fire dancer; she wears way too much flammable material to even think about fire dancing like the other people. [We had to hide her from the flying hot embers when they first lit the bonfire!] She was doing her thing while the fire dancers did their thing all around her. Here's a slightly different view, she was posing for me and just shaking out her wings so there was no real scene to capture, more of an action portrait. The second image is her in the middle of a spin during her dance, I fired an off camera flash during a long exposure to freeze her eyes but keep the swirl but it's not supposed to be one of those images you get right away, very experimental. Thanks for the critique GB!

[swmdrayfan]

all things considered Cindy, not a bad series. Never having tried anything of that nature, I'd be interested to find out what your settings were.
John

[CLKunst]

All of the images in this post were shot RAW at ISO 200 and between 1/30 and 1/60 using a Tamaron 28-300 F4.5 With a hand held off camera flash. For achieving the light trails I used a shutter speed of 4 seconds and tripped the flash at "3" to freeze her eyes. Thanks for asking!
Long exposures are fun. If you live in an area with very little light pollution I would recommend starting out with some star spin shots. That's where you set up the camera on a tripod in the dark outside, point your lens to the heavens and make some outrageously long exposures (I've done one for 5 hours although 20 minutes will yield you significant streakage.) to capture the spin of the earth. Of course the more ambient light you have around you the harder this is to achieve so a big dark field with lots of sky access is the best but interesting landscape in silhouette is a nice thing to add. I imagine that some southwestern canyons would look amazing using this effect. Of course with 4th of July coming and all there's another excellent opportunity to capture fireworks, you don't want to over do the exposure in that case. Here's a great article about that: "http://photo2.si.edu/firew/firew.html"
Anyway I'm sure that's way more than you asked for when you commented so if you do decide to try some night exposures please share, I'd love to see your efforts.
:yesnod: