The perfect exposure usually means that the subject of the photograph is clear and sharp. But when the subject is itself a light source and moving, something more is needed to get a photograph that reflects the photographer's vision. This article discusses the techniques I've discovered for photographing fire and light performances, for creating light paintings, or dancing light pictures. This photo captures the essence of a belly dance performance full of energy and joy. I'd suggest checking out a larger view to see the two joyful smiling faces on the left side, captured by the flash near the end of the exposure.

When I saw my first fire performance show in 2005 at our local regional burning man event, Interfuse, I knew I had to capture the moving flames in a photograph. It seemed obvious to me that I would need a tripod and a long exposure, and since I had a sturdy tripod with me, I made some pictures. The second fire spinning picture I took, "Spinner", was a four second exposure at f8. The clarity of the flames and their pattern is very interesting, perhaps even more interesting than the blur of live action. But somehow the ghostly image of the person doing the spinning didn't seem to fit into the design as well as the impression of what I saw with my eyes.

Sometimes, though, a longish exposure brings out both the wonderful pattern created by the spinner and the frozen aspect of the watchers. This is Keile working his dart, a ball of fire at the end of a 15 foot long rope and chain affair. What I like is how clearly he is dancing, even though you can't see him.

Fire spinners love to see pictures of themselves in action, and it hard to make an exposure the right speed to catch both the spinners and the fire. Here the pair of them held their position for the 3/4 of a second at F6.3 I used to make the picture. As you can see, though, the details of the bodies and faces are nearly impossible to make out. Plus, more often than not, the autofocus will not work under conditions like these, and using the manual focus, either through the viewfinder or peering at the LCD is only marginally better since the dancers are not usually standing in one place long enough to work the manual focus. So I generally use the only approximately accurate distance indicated on my screen and turn the manual focus dial until the distance indicated is about what I estimate it to be.

Photo editing to the rescue. Tweaking the exposure values in a photo editing program brings out sufficient detail to please the spinners who can now easily recognize themselves. I've used several tools such as Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop as well as things like ACDSee and Nero's tool. Generally speaking, you get what you pay for in terms of ability to bring out details without interfering with other aspects of the photo. Most of the time the cheaper tools work fine -- but not always. As you can see here, we've lost detail in the flames in order to bring out detail on the people. It is possible to keep both the flame detail and bring out the people, but this requires a high level of photo manipulation skills and a lot of time and patience. Better, in my opinion, to find a way to get what you want in the original exposure.

Timing is everything when working with fire, whether taking pictures of it or playing with it yourself. Lighting the bonfire by blowing fire at it, one up and one down, is hot work. It's also dangerous. Please don't try the fire tricks you see in these photos without training and a safety person standing by. Here the blur of the person leaning into to the fire adds to the picture, but this kind of blurring does not always work. The more expensive DSLR cameras will let you make hundred of exposures and usually you can find a few that work. I prefer to work on developing a sense of timing, trying to fire off the shutter, taking account the delay, to catch what I want to. Mostly because going through hundreds of images looking for the happy accident is a lot of work.

I sincerely hope I can get another photograph like this one day, zooming in on the spinner so that we see multiple versions of him within a spiral of fire. The first problem with using zoom like this is that you need a long enough exposure to work the zoom, pausing a couple of times. But a long exposure and flames means an overexposed image. The second problem is that you need to have a reasonably good idea about what the dancer is going to be doing during the exposure.

While the blur introduced by zooming can make for a very interesting image, and fire is fascinating, there are essentially only two colors: yellow and black. Fire dancers usually learn their moves by practicing with color lights and in this picture we get a hint of color from a neophyte spinning lights while behind him someone else is spinning fire. Working with colored lights leads to another set of exposure problems, and sometimes much more interesting images.

Going back to my first encounter with fire spinners, later that evening, I was thinking about patterns and light designs as I wandered into the dance area where dancers were spinning balls with colored lights. I set up my tripod and tried to capture those, mostly with disappointing results because the dancers were moving so fast and the colored lights are much dimmer than flames. However, while I was doing that, bombarded by very loud techno music, it occurred to me to use the zoom during a long exposure (30 seconds at f8): "Zooming pattern". The disadvantage of such long exposure is that the people who were dancing have disappeared. The advantage is that without a bright fire, the colors become clear and interesting.

Working with zoom on a stationary work of art lit by several ambient light sources is also very satisfying. 15 seconds at F8 is what I used here, along with a smooth zoom action.

Still at the "mind-licker dome" dance event I tried using a flash for the first time. I held the flash in my left hand above the camera and pointed it up. I has set the time to 3 seconds and fired the flash manually by counting the seconds. What I got was serendipity with a guy coming out from between two folks spinning orange light poi holding a light bulb.

Fire Swords 4901 Before discussing light dancing images in more detail, I want to digress a bit and talk about how I started fire dancing myself and how that led to an unexpected and wonderful collaboration. I had tried spinning the poi, without fire, and found that it is not a skill that come naturally to me at all. However, I've been doing fencing and other forms of sword work for many years. It wasn't long before I decided to build myself a set of fire swords. I set up the tripod, paced the distance and asked a friend to press the shutter, count to 3 and fire the flash. Then I lit my swords, started dancing and asked him to fire away.

Basic light sword

Fire works great outdoors, but indoors, or while practicing, lights work better, or at least safer. For interesting images, lights often work better too. So I also built a pair of "light swords." These are simply wooden sticks with battery powered colored lights taped to them.

"Colorfall" is an 8 second exposure at f14 of several dancers playing with the light toys during the shoot made in the Davis Gallery. Photomanipulation was not used to create the water color effect, that is a result of the moving camera and moving photographer and moving dancers.

"Flock" is a ten second exposure at f14 of the same dancers with a different selection of light toys.

The "Warrior on 9th Street" is actually a four second exposure at f11 of the interior of the Cherry Street Artisan between dances.

Spirit Dance 5279 was taken near my pond soon after the first studio session with Peter. I talked my daughter into dancing with the lights and found that a 7 second exposure at f4.5 gave me this. Here I'm using a tripod and counting on the dancer to come up with the image.

This picture of Dan, a professional ballet dancer, was taken at the second studio session with Peter Anger. This one was a 13 second exposure at f16 and I moved the camera, rotating and shifting my position during the 13 seconds before firing the flash manually.

Inspired by my first studio session with Peter Anger, the next weekend I talked my daughter into playing with some light swords I had built and experimented with firing the flash manually part way through the exposure, as close to the end as possible. This was taken at f4.5 for seven seconds.

The previous light paintings used battery powered lights. Glow sticks, the chemical based things that glow for a few hours once you activate them, put out very little light. The original of this one is nearly completely black. Work with the curves tool allows me to bring out quite a bit of interesting detail as Budda celebrated her 9th birthday with her first attempt at spinning. However, there are some pronounced color shifts, which might or might not be acceptable. Here I think it works.

Expensive cameras are not needed to create great light paintings. This one of Lizzie West performing at Mojo's was taken with a point and shoot Canon. It did take several tries to get the effect I was looking for by moving the camera and then holding it still. I suspect the image stabilization helps.