A Stick Burning Party

A friend of mine had a thought to have a party and revolve this party around burning sticks as well as a party to usher in spring. I think it is ingenious. Invite your friends to help gather sticks and branches that fell during winter pile them up and have a party to help burn them and of course to keep an eye on the fires as well. In the photo above is one of two piles that were used to burn these said sticks. A very cute firebox with stars and moons.


Getting together and having a party is always awesome but to bring live music to it makes it even better. To have lots of musicians as your friends - priceless! I was one of those musicians and out of 20-30 some odd people more than 75% were musicians who brought instruments with them. I brought my Michael Kelly 5 string acoustic bass with me but it was drowned out by the acoustic guitars. Good thing someone had an upright and I brought my camera so things worked out for the best.


To capture the essence of fire is a bit difficult. So many parameters to consider. One being how to focus on something that's not quite there yet or is dancing around like crazy. Having a small f stop is pointless to make sharp focus problematic. Making sure the flames don't overpower the embers in the belly of the fire is a lighting problematic. So waiting for the fire to "cool down" yet keep it's height was a 10 minute ordeal. I was able to freeze the essence of this fire with one shot at the right time at f1.4, 1/1600 sec. @ ISO 3200. In the larger photo one can see the embers just as well as the detached flames at the top of the fire column.



In the above photo a "fire tender" resting after stoking "burning sticks". Fire does tend to make for some very interesting shadows and highlights. Here I positioned myself to use the light from the fire as more rim lighting than trying to light the subject as a whole and to keep the other faces in as having full lighting on the face .


Macro is the "bomb"! The photo above was taken with a 105mm f2 macro lens. And yes, it was very hot. I thought I would loose some knuckle hair on this shot. I didn't have very much time to compose, focus, and shoot. I didn't want to loose my lens after all. This was shot through the fire box on the top photo.
All in all I had a good time at this party taking photos of the fire and the people, conversing with other musicians and photographers. Thanks for the invite Jenn!
Well now I hope you enjoyed another post on my "A Day,.... in the life..." Till next time - Peace!
B