Fire Rope Dart

Last Sunday I did a collab shoot with Adam, a talented fire rope dart artist and performer. It was an awesome shoot despite the cold 40° F temperature. The shoot was about an hour long.

For this shoot I used my Sony A7 with the Zeiss 28mm f/2.8 Biogon T* ZM lens. The camera was mounted on a sturdy tripod and triggered remotely using a remote trigger to avoid camera shake.

I first experimented with 10 secs exposure time, f/8.0, AWB and ISO 100. I found that the 10 secs exposure time was too long and soaking too much of the ambient light. I dropped the exposure time from 10 secs to 5 secs, it was better but I still wanted to knock off more of the ambient light, so I closed down the aperture to f/16.0 which also gave me a greater depth-of-field.

As I was using a manual focus lens, I just dialed the lens to infinity (∞). With f/16.0 everything from ~2.5' to ∞ was in focus. This allowed me to move around without having to adjust the focus every time I move. The down side is everything, including the background is also in focus. In my case I just made sure that I knock off the background ambient lights as much as possible so it doesn't show up in the final image.

The one thing I wish I brough with me was a on-camera flash so I can get a clear shot of him. What I would do is trigger the flash before the shutter closes.

All images were shot in RAW and edited in Adobe Lightroom.

#AdamReiSiegel #FireRopeDart #Fire #SonyA7 #Zeiss28mmf28BiogonTZM #LongExposure