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Description
Tribute to gaurawa 's brilliant image Band of Brothers .
Trying to give a slightly different feel to the same image, composing a little differently and - most importantly - finding a way to capture the glow of the matches after being blown out. Taking the heroic symbolism a little further - showing an "inner light" rather than the matches looking cold and dead. This proved a very difficult feat of timing and exposure.

I now have a new-found respect for that gaurawa's patience. My setup was quite complicated:
100-400L IS, stabiliser turned off, tripod, 25mm extension tube, mirror lockup, remote release.
Two Sigma EF-500's, wireless master and slave, the master on an off-camera hotshoe cable to the right of the matches lighting them from the side, the slave underneath and behind the matches pointing up to light the smoke.
Manual mode with 6 seconds to catch the glow. Flash exposure locked (and mirror locked up) before igniting the matches, and set to underexpose by 2/3 of a stop. Miniature blowtorch used to light the matches. Matches attached to masking tape stretched between two bottles.

The most time-consuming part was setting up a new set of matches each time, then re-focusing on them, adjusting lighting using modelling flash and DOF preview, switching room lights on and off to do this, etc. Ran out of matches in the end, this is the best of what i came up with.

The setup is shown here: [link] [link] [link] [link]

Prints are available as usual from http://riot.dpcprints.com .

Description
Tribute to gaurawa 's brilliant image Band of Brothers .
Trying to give a slightly different feel to the same image, composing a little differently and - most importantly - finding a way to capture the glow of the matches after being blown out. Taking the heroic symbolism a little further - showing an "inner light" rather than the matches looking cold and dead. This proved a very difficult feat of timing and exposure.

I now have a new-found respect for that gaurawa's patience. My setup was quite complicated:
100-400L IS, stabiliser turned off, tripod, 25mm extension tube, mirror lockup, remote release.
Two Sigma EF-500's, wireless master and slave, the master on an off-camera hotshoe cable to the right of the matches lighting them from the side, the slave underneath and behind the matches pointing up to light the smoke.
Manual mode with 6 seconds to catch the glow. Flash exposure locked (and mirror locked up) before igniting the matches, and set to underexpose by 2/3 of a stop. Miniature blowtorch used to light the matches. Matches attached to masking tape stretched between two bottles.

The most time-consuming part was setting up a new set of matches each time, then re-focusing on them, adjusting lighting using modelling flash and DOF preview, switching room lights on and off to do this, etc. Ran out of matches in the end, this is the best of what i came up with.

The setup is shown here: [link] [link] [link] [link]

Prints are available as usual from http://riot.dpcprints.com .