Rain.

Well, yesterday we had a pretty hard rain. It was very short, but for a bit, there was even some hail. After watching it pour like mad for a while, I decided I wanted to go outside and take pictures. I sealed my camera up to protect it from the rain, and started walking around the yard. I only got a chance to fire off a few shots before the rain stopped, and out of the shots I took, only liked one enough to finish. It's the daisy up above. I got some other shots that I thought could use improving, so the next time it rains, I'll be out trying to get those as well as looking for other fun stuff. There are some very big storms up north right now - perhaps they'll share some of their rainy goodness with me.

Fire.

Well, it appears I've had a relapse of the pyromania everybody has during their teenage years. The first shot I took, about 4 days ago, was the shot of the candle to the left. This was a pretty straightforward shoot, and I wasn't really attempting anything very special. I just wanted to see how much light a flame threw around. There was actually some pretty nasty haloing and flaring in this shot that I cleaned up with The GIMP. On this (and all the rest of these shots) I tried to make sure all the shots ended up with a black background (as opposed to a really dark background).

The shot of the sparks and igniting gas was taken on the next day. I originally wanted a shot of a hand holding a lighter, lit solely by it's flame. After a shot or two of the flame, I got bored and decided I wanted to catch sparks, so I started sparking. During the shoot, I came up with this incredibly lucky capture and fell in love with it. It wasn't very well composed, so I changed composure in The GIMP.

Now for the next shot. The incense. Originally I wanted to experiment with two things. One was firing some light through smoke to capture that, and the second was using a second film body as the source of said light. Since I've gotten my 30D, the Rebel GII film body I have has been relegated to a backup body position. When you use the AE lock on a Canon camera, if you've configured the camera to use the flash, it will fire off a burst to get a TTL reading. I wanted to see if I could use this burst as a ghetto manual flash. I can. At the beginning of this shoot, I decided I wanted the incense in the shoot, so I recomposed with that in mind. I also knew I wanted to see the incense and get some nice rimlight, so I set up the GII camera right slightly behind the incense/smoke, and a reflector camera left, opposite the flash. In one of the shots, I saw a little flare, and did what it took to eliminate it. While I was shooting more, I kept thinking about that flare, and decided I wanted to try to get a shot with that flare in, so I repositioned a few times until I found a flare that worked to my liking.

And on to today's shot. The burning CD. Thanks to a great response from the Zooomr community, and particularly to a user named flwrgrl (who has some very lovely work with flowers and water, by the way), I decided to push the fire thing a little more. I once saw a concept shot with a literally burning CD, and I'd wanted to shoot one of my own for some time now, but never really got around to it. But with all the fire-related shots lately, I figured now was a perfect time. I got out the lighter fluid, and started playing. First I experimented with flash (The GII and reflector from the incense shoot) as well to get some rainbow out of the CD, but the first time I lit it up, I realized the fire alone was bright enough to nullify the need for a flash. It took one burn to dial in the exposure to a reasonable level, and this was the second attempt. On the first attempt, I left a burn on my background material (it's actually white), and upon lighting this one up, I burned my hand a little. But I like the shot. All worth it.

Well, there it is. Four shots in four days. Now it's time to pack up my gear and call it a night (morning?) and think about whether I want to continue with the fire theme or not. There are plenty of things that can be safely set on fire, but I don't want to shoot random things on fire just because I can set them on fire. We'll see :)