I took this photo in 2017, and it’s one of my favorites. My goal was to do genuine justice to the amazing work of Kuon, a fire dancer who performed at American Village around that time.
We went out to the north end of Sunabebaba Beach where we set up the camera on the rocks. I used a 14mm all-manual lens to accentuate depth in the frame and give the image a unique perspective, and set a flash to the left of the camera in a large square softbox.
Kuon ignited a couple of flammable wands that were attached to chains, then started doing some of his well-rehearsed dance moves. I asked him to look straight into camera while swinging the fireballs left and right. I took lots of shots, trying to get the fireballs in exactly the right position.
Capturing the Fire Dancer' Image
I was shooting at a 1/8 sec shutter with the intent of blurring the fire, but not Kuon’s face, and this worked. There was no other light besides the flash, so the shutter speed was not of great importance for items in the frame that had to be lit with flash to be seen. A camera flash lasts for about 1/20,000 of a second.
I was able to light Kuon and the rocks around him with the flash, but everything else in the frame was black. To produce a more realistic image, I shot an exposure in the same place (without moving the camera at all) to get some background. Unfortunately, I could only capture lights on one side of the bay, so I duplicated the background and flipped in horizontally, giving the image a more symmetrical look.
Post-processing
The sky was too black, so I took an image of the stars I’d shot in Onna a few weeks earlier and layered it behind Kuon and behind the ocean. The result is the composite image you see here.
To make this image work, I had to drop the ‘highlights’ on the image as a whole, and paint them back in with a brush on the areas where they were needed, like the fire dancer’s face. This allowed me to bring out maximum color in the fireballs.
I also boosted shadows to enhance detail and dropped the black levels slightly to keep everything contrasty and crisp.
Final Notes
I love shooting composite images because they liberate the photographer from the limits of what happens to be in the frame at one time, and also from the limits of what can be captured with one exposure setting. I needed the texture of the rocks in the foreground and immediate background, but also the stars above and behind the dancer and the symmetrical background. Stitching the final image together as a composite made this possible.
Sunabebaba Beach
Map link to Sunabebaba Beach where the image was shot.
Google Maps Link to Sunabebaba Park
