Spark of creativity
Camera: Canon Eos R8
Lens: Canon RF100-400 F5.6-8
Using some steel wool and an old motor I created a small circle of sparks, inspired by a friend sharing a video of fire dancing!
This shot was taken with a long exposure showing several spins of the wool. The setup for this was affixing a bit of steel wool to an old motor on a raised arm. Igniting the steel wool with a blowtorch causes the steel to continue to burn provided air is pushed onto it, such as blowing on it or spinning the wool as it burns.
In order to start this without flying sparks shooting at me I first had to ignite the wool and then run back to the camera a safe distance away and plug the motor in, several attempts resulted in the wool extinguishing before I could make it to the cord, as it requires moving air to continue burning.
This is one of my favorite shots of the sparks as you can see a trail of 4-6 individual streaks forming a large helix as they fly away. Im unsure how this happens but many of the photos exhibit small helix patterns in the sparks. This was by far the largest cluster of sparks forming one though.
This image shows the wool reaching the center where it was connected to the motor, the trails are created by the shutter being open long enough for the motor to almost make a full rotation, I chose to take the image at this speed to preserve the trails in one spin to have more detail, had I let it do more than one full rotation the entire circle would be a solid color, similar to the first image above.
It was very challenging to find photos of this that I didn’t like, so there are a lot of them here, plus a video below!
Here is a short video showing the setup as well as one of the attempts, apologies for the clicking in the audio, setting the aperture on my camera is very noisy while recording.
I loved the results from this little experiment and I will definitely be trying to get to a fire dancing show to photograph it in person some day! Very grateful to my good friend Shenn for inspiring this!
