Advanced Digital Photography

Image may contain: fire, candle and light

For this image I tried to really capture fire as an element in itself. I wanted to capture the gradient of the flame colors too so I chose a shutter speed of 1/30 and set the aperture to f/5.6, ISO 100. However, it took a lot of trial and error and choosing different shutter speeds as sometimes the flame would only get shot and not the match itself. My idea was to keep the background black as I wanted all of the focus to be on the flame and the detail on the end of the match stick.

My thought process behind this image was the whole idea of water being the opposite of fire in classical terms. I set my camera settings to shoot in burst mode as I would lower the match slowly towards the water to get it as close to the water as possible before it went out. After many many tries I discovered that a shutter speed of 1/125 and f/2.5 worked best (ISO 400). It was very difficult to capture the reflection of the flame in the water as well as getting a good angle of the flame.

For this image I wanted to add a background color behind the flame. I chose red as it symbolizes danger, power and energy in color theory, just like fire. I chose this particular shot because the flame is small, and I think it implies the message that even though a flame is small it's still very dangerous and can escalate quickly causing a lot of damage to its surroundings. I switched my lens to a 50mm one set the shutter speed to 8 seconds, f/10 and ISO 100. I used my phone screen to create the red light behind the match.