Nine times out of ten, you hold up your camera, peer into your viewfinder and spin one or two of your dials.

You do what it takes to center the LED on “0”.

In automatic modes, you select the aperture or shutter speed and you trust the camera select the other freeing you to concentrate on your composition.

Intentional under exposure–I knew what was important in my viewfinder, the white doves and nothing else. I didn’t want to see any reflections in the sculpture’s marble, so I took this picture 1/8000 sec @ f2 instead of what was recommended.

The more often you use your camera, the sooner you’ll learn to recognize when not to believe that meter and when you should.

Correct exposure?–Based on what the meter suggested, see how washed out the image above is? Sometimes there’s you have to decide the best exposure based on what you feel is important. The camera is only as smart as the programming.

Automatic modes are good for many situations except when there is a either a lot of darkness or brightness in a scene.

Scenes which have a overwhelming brightness like the beach, snowscapes or the night sky with a full moon which you want to capture with detail.

That’s when you need to take charge and make a decision.

Left to its own devices, the meter which controls the automatic exposure modes will make its best guess of what it thinks is the subject and expose for that accordingly.

If you’re have an option to change the metering pattern on your camera, that would be a good 1st option.

Instead of having the camera do its overall metering, you can choose center-weighted or spot for more precision.

Since not every camera has these metering patterns, your best chance of getting a well exposed image is to understand what the meter wants to do.

Folks who swear by the automatic modes of Aperture or Shutter Priority will no doubt tell you they can work faster.

That’s true if you’ve committed to memory which combination of buttons on your camera body to depress for Exposure Compensation.

That Exposure Compensation button is a global setting.

After you take that picture, if you forget to reset the Exposure Compensation to “0,” you and or the next person using the camera on the automatic mode will get burned.

If you happen to set the Exposure Compensation to -1 (minus 1) then all your pictures will be set to underexposed by 1 f-stop until you reset it to zero.

I find it easier to just raise/increase the shutter speed or setting a smaller aperture depending what I want to control.

If I’m at my top shutter speed and I can’t go any higher, then I’ll close down the aperture or use the next higher numerical value.

Reasons to underexpose

1. Increase saturation of colors
2. Isolate or emphasize only the brightest subject in the scene
3. Shooting silhouettes

Increasing Saturation
Compare the 2 pictures below. One is made with normal exposure, what the camera recommends. 1/125 sec @ f3.5. For simplicity’s sake, let’s say the exposure is 1/125 sec @ f4.

Since my subject are the flowers and I know I want them to be as sharp as possible, I’ll shoot for maximum depth-of-field f22.

My equivalent exposure shooting at f22 is approximately 1/4 sec.

Just by under-exposing 1/2 a stop from what is recommended, you can already see how dramatic the colors look now.

See the final image exposed at 1/20 sec @ f22

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Peter Phun Photography

Siblings–The image above taken in 2001 with a Nikon D1 is among my favorite of my kids. I don’t recall much about it. Just dad with kids playing out front of the house. Most of my favorite family pictures are seat-of-the-pants variety. I’m either ready or I’ll catch it another time. The trick is to always be ready with that camera. Then you can make it seem like luck.

As the day for my “show” at Back to the Grind draws closer and closer, I am feeling a little anxiety.

Those of you who live in the area, mark the day on your calendar April 1.

Riverside has its monthly Art Walk, the 1st Thursday of every month which begins at 6 pm.

If you’re around, come by and say hi. I promise this is not a gag or a practical joke.

I’m grappling with what to display.

It would be nice if all the pictures could be work I’ve done since I left the newspaper.

Newspaper photography no matter how good it is, has the unfortunate stigma that it has little value beyond the day the picture ran.

Hence the low brow reaction and the putdown, “Your work is only good enough to wrap the goods at a fish market or line the bird cage.”

No shelf life.

There are exceptions no doubt especially if the image is memorable, famous and has changed the course of history.

There is a mindset amongst news photographers that they’re only as good as the last picture they took.

That sort of thinking comes from the constant reminding by the management at newspapers.

The editors and decision-makers like to hold that standard over your head while you’re under their employ mostly because they want to squeeze the most out of you.

Most photographers at newspapers are very conscientious about their work.

If it was bad picture, they can make all sorts of excuses, but in the end, it’s their name in the byline.

That reminder motivated me more than the 25-cent-an-hour raise my boss would wave in front of me.

Fisherman in Kota Kinabalu–During my visit to East Malaysia, I came across this fisherman and his son gazing pensively into the South China Sea. It was the colors that beckoned me to raise my camera.

I like spontaneity in my pictures. That’s what drew me towards photography in newspapers.

So you might see  a hodge-podge of personal pictures like the one above of my kids.

I might include the one above of a fisherman and his son gazing into the South China Sea.

When it comes to taking pictures, it’s good to know what is your fail-safe picture for any given assignment.

But it’s also important that you push yourself to experiment and get out of the comfort zone.

Address the needs of your clients first, but don’t overlook your own.

There have been times I was disappointed the client didn’t agree with my choices like the portrait of Rebecca O’Connor –the Lady Falconer.

In the end, what matters is I gave the client what they wanted and I also found a picture which I liked.

First day of school–When I worked at the newspaper, every fall at the start of the new school year, I could always count on being sent to illustrate/document this. Just how big a deal is this day, I can’t say for you. I was lucky to be able to be there for my son’s 1st day in Kindergarten.

Previously I mentioned when you took on the title “family documentarian” or “family photographer, you will have to sacrifice a little for your art.

What? You think your spouse is going to let it slide when she could have bought herself an expensive pair of shoes, some shiny rocks or designer purse, instead of letting you have that digital SLR?

How about if you very cunningly introduce her to photography as well?

But that can easily backfire depending on how competitive she is and how bad a photographer you are.

All kidding aside, once you get a handle on your camera, you will be up to the challenge.

That’s when the fun begins and you’ll enjoy being there for life’s special moments.

But to get to the point where you know if you’re there with your camera, you have it covered takes quite a bit of doing.

Some people can crack open a book, read it and learn how to operate the camera.

But operating a camera and controlling it are two very different things.

Controlling a camera involves more than turning it on and snapping some pictures.

Milestones–There will be milestones in your child’s life like a graduation from pre-school and so on. It’s nice to not have to worry about taking pictures at times. That’s when you try to get a good point-and-shoot camera. Those cameras have come a long way. The picture above was taken with a Nikon D-1. It was one of the earliest digital SLRs which actually looked like a film camera body. The RAW file was a whopping 2.7 Megapixel!

Important questions to ask

There is thinking involved. You have to consciously ask yourself a myriad of questions when looking into the viewfinder. Some common ones are:

“What’s the subject?”

“What should be in focus?”

“Relative to the direction light, where should my subject be placed?”

“What’s in the background? “Is it adding to my subject?”

So more ambitious folks will want to learn how to control their camera.

The most surest way is to practice shooting in manual mode.

When you learn to use a camera in manual mode, it’s like learning to drive a stick shift car or standard transmission.

When someone hands you any camera, you will be able to operate it confidently.

On a personal level, I often wish I could be 2 places at once–behind my camera and also just being a spectator at times.

Talk about wanting to have your cake and eat it too.

It’s exactly moments like that when I use my point-and-shoot camera.

If you’re using a point-and-shoot camera, set as many of the options manually as you can.

That usually cuts down the lag time between when you squeeze the shutter and when it actually clicks.

When you press on the shutter button on these cameras, 3 things need to take place. The camera needs to:

1. determine White Balance
2. acquire focus
3. determine exposure

Setting the White Balance and exposure beforehand, will speed the camera up at times because it then only needs to acquire focus.

That excuse worked for me. You should have no problem selling your spouse that you need a point-and-shoot as well. Good luck.

Something to keep in mind is this.

No patron of the arts will indefinitely fund your passion if you don’t produce.

You need to make some enlargements of her favorite pictures and frame them.

Being there–In my previous life, I photographed events as they happened. The “m.o” was to be unobtrusive and blend in. No flash and a fast lens. Cameras these days have great low-light and low noise capabilities to make this possible. I would have liked to be in this picture, wouldn’t you?

Goal– Not the sharpest picture I’ve taken, but given the circumstances, I am thankful I have it.I’m sure my son thinks so. If there is a downside to not working at the newspaper, it’s not having access to long lenses. Shooting soccer without at least a  400mm can be a challenge because there is so much clutter in the background and the action is usually far away. For that reason pros who shoot soccer usually use 2 camera bodies. One with the long telephoto on a monopod and a 2nd body with a 70 -200 zoom.

As the “photographer” in the family, we often have to “take one for the team.”

By that I mean, “we” often don’t get to just enjoy the moment as a spectator.

It’s worse if you’re the coach and you’re trying to photograph the game as well.

Been there and done that.

By the end of the game, my brain is totally fried from the multi-tasking.

Celebrating his win–Once you’ve mastered the use of your camera, you’re ready to think about all the “what-ifs.” Ask yourself, what might happen next. Where’s the picture most likely going to happen? Since this is your child, you will know them better than anyone else.  That’s the key to being ready at the right place and the right time with the right lens–anticipation. Canon 1D. 17mm lens. 1/8000sec @f2.8 ISO 200.

Bad combination, poor lighting & fast action–. Even with the best equipment, indoor sports is a challenge. The low light levels make it next to impossible to freeze action or else the problem is the cluttered backgrounds because the audience is so close to the court. To make this image presentable I had to apply a dose of Noise Ninja. Canon 20D. 80-200 zoom 1/125 sec @f2.8 ISO 1600.

When I’m peering into that viewfinder, even with both eyes open, I am very focused on what I see within that frame.

Those of you who have covered sports will know what I mean.

But you don’t even have to shoot sports professionally to relate to this.

Training that telephoto lens on your kid who’s about to score a goal is a good example.

The angle of view is extremely narrow.

That ball is visible for very brief durations in that viewfinder.

The tighter the framing, the less of the ball you’ll see.

When you trip the shutter, there’s momentary darkness as the mirror moves up and out of the way to let light through and the curtains open to expose the sensor to light.

This all happens in a fraction of a second, so you can’t often see if the ball crossed the goal line.

Your clue might be if the crowd goes wild. But confirmation by the referee’s whistle is the only sure way to tell.

A blink of an eye–It wasn’t until I got back to my computer that I realized how close I cropped this picture. In sports photography, an extra frame can be all the difference since there are no “do-overs”. If I could, I would certainly want to show more of the face of the kid on the right. He was looking skywards as if looking for divine intervention. Canon 1D. 1/2000sec @ f4 ISO 200.  80-200mm zoom at 150mm.

It’s a good idea to grab a shot of the score board immediately after.

That will be useful when you’re editing to tell you when that picture was taken during the actual game.

Newbies often dwell on that ball whether the sport is basketball, football or soccer.

Once that play is over, the ball is no longer important.

THE PICTURE is the EXPRESSION on the person who just shot the ball.

You should be tracking that person who just shot the ball.

Why? Your role is not to arbitrate or to prove it they scored with your picture.

As a rookie, the first basketball game I shot, I actually shot a closeup of the ball entering the hoop! That was how literal I was thinking.

I suppose I should be embarrassed to admit to that but go ahead and laugh. I did.

It was only in retrospect that I realized photography isn’t at all literal.

Now if the story of that particular game was that there was some dispute over the ball not entering the basket, I suppose the picture would have been important.

In a sport like basketball where the score is often 3 digits, just take my word for it, having the ball in the picture is good but sometimes not the most important thing.

Rule #1
Don’t expect to win when you enter a photography contest.

As strong an image as you think you may have, the odds are not very good.

It is so subjective.

I know this for a fact because I’ve judged a few contests in my day.

Depending on the caliber of the judges, there is sometimes a tone of jealousy in the voices of the judges especially when they like a picture.

Old piece of firewood–One of my earliest contest wins. This is old as you can see from the date. But, it wasn’t anything to sneer at. The Akron Press Club paid for one whole semester of tuition! For an impoverished foreign student majoring in photojournalism, it meant a lot. I’ve kept it all these years as a reminder to myself that daring to dream is important.

It’s as if they won’t admit that they wish they were the one who took the winning picture.

So they sometimes say, this picture could be improved if… the photographer had stepped to the right about a foot. So what if it meant that the photographer would have to walk off the edge of the cliff.

Rule #2
Don’t enter contests if you can’t stand losing
This goes without saying. Photographers are poor losers. Count yours truly as one too. This is also why I won’t admit to entering a photo contest in over 10 years.

Rule #3
Read the rules and fine print very, very carefully.
Many contests are what’s called a rights grab by unscrupulous folks who put on contests.

Be mindful of what you’re agreeing to when entering contests.

The unscrupulous ones may end up your picture forever and ever without paying you a single cent, even if you don’t end up winning. Just by entering, and checking a box that you agree to their terms, you may be forfeiting all your rights.

Rule #4
Use contests as a “kick in the rear” to get you out the door so that you are using that camera.
Whenever I bid adieu to my students, I wish them well and suggest contests and starting a photoblog.

Now that you’ve spent all that hard earned money on gear, here’s your chance to see how you measure up.

If nothing else, you can always check yourself against my signs that you’ve crossed the threshold from pretender to contender. Before you harangue me with your comments, please note that was written in tongue-in-cheek.

Instead of shooting for a contest, why not shoot to share with others?

Creating a photoblog can be rewarding, a lot of fun, not terribly expensive or difficult. That is a better motivator in the long run.

Starting a photoblog isn’t all that difficult anymore. The platforms are there. You don’t even need to know any HTML. The GUI (graphical user interface) makes everything easy.

The big popular ones are Blogger, WordPress or TypePad.

Unless you have darkroom experience, you probably won’t know what a “contact sheet” or “proof sheet” is.

Now that we have digital photography, the term itself is irrelevant.

The “contact sheet” or “proof sheet” is nothing more than a grid of thumbnails of your entire shoot which displays unique numbers underneath each image.

A lot can be learned from it. But you must have the right attitude when you share it with your coach or mentor.

Remember not to get defensive. If you’re asking for help this way, leave the attitude at the door.

As I said previously, if you have enough memory cards, never erase your images in the camera.

I’m not saying save those “masterpieces” of your foot, car trunk or back of your lens cap when you accidentally fired off the shutter.

You might want to take a look at the images I shot on Valentines Day as you watch the video below.

Also take a look at the picture below. It shows the reverse angle and it should give you a better idea of why I decided to stand where I did to do the picture

On my tippy toes–I’m not that tall. I’m on my tippy toes here and holding my camera over my head using a wide angle lens and doing what’s called a Hail Mary and guessing what I’ll see in the viewfinder.

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone. And to my Chinese friends and family, Happy New Year!

Shooting into the sun–With my 50 mm lens 1/8000 @ f1.4 ISO 100 and backlighting the flower bloom, you lose a sense of what kind of light was used or even the time of the day. This was early morning around 7:45 am.

The sun came out of hiding finally.

I went by one of my favorite buildings downtown–the Life Arts Center which is one hundred years old, I think.

Those pictures for the story were taken by David Bauman, long-time staff photographer at the paper and a good friend.

His dad Fred was the one who hired me out of college.

At the entryway there is a huge bougainvillea plant with red pinkish blossoms.

During certain times of the year and time of the morning, the sunlight just catches it right.

5 minutes earlier or later and the whole scene looks different.

If you’re driving, that means it won’t catch your eye and you’ll miss it.

If you’re walking and you’re in not in a hurry, you will see it.

Let me take that back.

You might notice it too, but might decide I’m making too much out of a silly bloom of bougainvillea flowers.

Room for improvement?—Sometimes you can’t plan on composing exactly in the viewfinder and so you have to crop in post production. I suppose I could lose the roof in the picture by pointing my camera slightly down and capturing more road.

One of the most interesting things about photography is that no two people see the same way.

You could send out 100 people with the same lens and camera, confine them to a small area and you’ll see very different images.

So I may be the only person alive who thinks this is a scene be worthy of a picture.

The picture above was taken with a 50 mm lens across the street.

I switched to my longer zoom to give me ability to crop “in camera.”  I certainly didn’t need all that clutter in the scene and if I can do that when shooting, I end up with a bigger image size.

That way if I want to enlarge this, I’ll have a nice crisp image with lots of resolution–enough to make into a poster if need be.

From 2 years ago–Here’s the bougainvillea plant from Feb 27, 2008. The time was 8:15 am. Shot with my 80-200mm zoom lens. In case you’re thinking I have such great recall, don’t. That EXIF info is available whenever you go back to your original files. So it’s pretty much the same time of the year.

Composing in viewfinder

I’m an advocate of composing in the viewfinder as much as possible because when you do decide to have your prints made for display on a wall, you can actually save a lot on matting.

If you watch the clutter in the edges, and you compose as if you are seeing the final print in a matte, you won’t have to cut custom mattes.

Every custom cut matte means extra expense on your part. Keeping that in mind, if you’re on budget, you can re-use the same mattes and just swap out your pictures.

I can use more fans on Facebook, so help me out everyone. It’s not like it’s going to cost you anything.

Photographing strangers have always been something I enjoy.

Part of it has to do with the possibility that I can be told to take a hike, or worse, be punched in the face.

It’s not that I like to antagonize people.

It’s a real challenge even if you have the camera handling down.

Quizzical look of a fruit vendor–This guy was curious to see me use a strange-looking camera I’m sure. The Hasselblad with 80mm lens shot wide open at f2.8 produces nice sharp images but it is a slow camera to work. You have to take first a meter-reading with a handheld meter.The 500CM had no built-in meter. Ridiculous considering how much it cost me. The fruit is called lychee.

In case  you’re wondering why the square picture, I took these with an 80 mm lens on a Hasselblad.

That was a wonderful camera but it was not a camera you could work quickly. Heavy and just plain clunky.

Sadly I had to part with it my senior in college. I was out of funds and it broke my heart to have to sell it.

There are really 2 aspects to this:

• the actual picture-taking
• and there’s the part where I have to engage my subjects and disarm them, if you will

The years I spent as a newspaper photographer has instilled a confidence I didn’t always have to go up to anyone on the street.

The key is to actually size up the person, then start a conversation before even holding up the camera.

While being able to converse is crucial, sometimes gesturing is all it takes.

At the back of your mind, you need to respect the possibility that the person might actually don’t want to be photographed.

So be a good sport.

Who knows?

They may be a felon who’s on the lam.

Or they could be out with someone they’re not supposed to be with.

One Noisy vendor–My recollection of this itinerant vendor who sells baked goods is not pleasant. The dome you see on his handlebars must be the noisiest contraption ever deviced. He strikes it with a metal rod whenever he comes our neighborhood with no regard to the time of the morning.

Over the years, I’ve learned not to assume affectionate couples in public are married to each other.

Sometimes they’re not even though both have wedding bands.

In all the pictures, my subjects knew I was taking their picture except for the the Indian gentleman who is pushing his bicycle/cart.

I grabbed that picture in a hurry when I saw him crossing the street.

The one of the trishaw peddler could sure use fill-flash, but what can I say?

I was on vacation and didn’t feel like working too hard.

A cruise on a trishaw– Visitors and tourists who have time on their hands can really see the older neighborhoods in downtown Penang when they try this old means of transportation.

Rickshaws are the ones where the passenger sits behind and they are pulled.

Trishaws found in Malaysia are man-powered too, but the “muscle” or person is riding a bicycle that’s pushing a carriage that has 2 wheels in front.

If you do visit Malaysia or my place of birth, Penang, just be aware trishaws rarely plow the streets anymore because of the traffic congestion.

It’s a tough way to make a living. There is room for 3 skinny locals but when Westerners hire one of these, forget it.

How do I start off this 3rd segment Assignments: ones I enjoyed?

Did I mention I met my wife on an assignment?

I photographed her for a story, one thing led to another… and this photographer rode off into the sunset with the girl.

Sports

While at the newspaper, I was often asked, “How do you get a job like yours? You get to shoot football, baseball etc?”

It made me realize how lucky I was to be able to do this for a living.

I enjoyed the competitiveness of shooting sports because the next day, I could always check the sports pages of the different newspapers in the LA area to see what their photographers got.

Sure, there was no prize or even an “attaboy” from the boss, but it was as real a test as I can think off to measure how I did. There was no pretense or excuses.

Covering sports was fun in that way.

In the Spring when the pro tennis circuit came through I especially enjoyed covering tennis at the Newsweek Tennis Open in the Coachella Valley.

Weather out there was a balmy 70ºF while the rest of the country was a frigidly cold.

We would spend our entire 8 hour shift covering that.

That night and weekend/sports shift also meant we got to cover concerts occasionally.

Concerts

Now concert photography isn’t always all that fun because you’re usually allowed to shoot the first 3 songs.

It’s one thing if you can count on the performer being someone you like or heard of.

Most of the time, they are just loud and crowded except for the time I got to listen to Luciano Pavarrotti rehearse.

But that was in Cleveland when I was an intern at a small newspaper in Ohio. It was just him, the orchestra and me.

Now that was magical.

The weekend/night or what I affectionately call the “family wrecking shift” used to be assigned to the rookies and junior photographers.

Or when it came up, we could trade amongst ourselves, but all that changed when the ownership of the newspaper changed.

It didn’t matter anymore what the tradition was or what a employee who paid his dues wanted.

For me, that attitude of management marked the decline of the newspaper I worked for.

Feature Pictures

Feature pictures are like self-assignments, ones photographers originate and generate.

By their very nature, since it’s my “muse” I already know I’m going to love it.

It’s a chance to showcase my very own creativity.

On slow days when there were no assignments, I loved the freedom of just driving around looking for story ideas.

I came across many of my favorite pictures that way.

Banking left—When we were above the area which is now called the Diamond Valley Lake, the tow plane on the right released the cable and we were on our own. I asked our pilot to start a steep bank so the cockpit could be lit by the sunlight.

The aerial photo above I took on board the sailplane/glider was exactly that.

Is it original? Heck, no. It’s been done over and over again by glider pilots especially.

I just wanted to get up in the air in a glider. If you’ve never done it, you should try it.

There’s no sound of an obnoxious engine once the towing plane releases the line.

It’s just you, the thermals which you ride to great heights and supreme peace.

Since I had some flying background, I could visualize what my final image would look like.

The hard part was securing my motorized Nikon F3 safely on the wing of the glider and finding a pilot who would agree to taking me up.

When I finally did find a pilot, he turned out to be an 80-year-old.

His co-workers asked, “Young man, do you know how old he is? Aren’t you scared?”

They didn’t have to know I knew how to fly so I just smiled.

So the camera was loaded with one roll of Fujichrome 100, a 36-exposure roll.

I mounted my 18mm lens (the shortest wide angle lens I was issued), set the aperture to f22 and taped the focus down for the hyperfocal distance to yield maximum depth-of-field.

I tested my Quantum radio slave on the ground and off we went. One short 15 minute flight.

Exposure mode had to be set to aperture priority because there was no way to change anything once we were airborne.

Based on my experience of shooting Fujichrome 100, I was confident that the shutter speed would be between 1/60 sec and 1/125 sec—more than enough to stop any camera shake or motion since we were in glider and there weren’t going to be any vibrations from an engine.

Meeting interesting and inspirational folks in the community was something I thoroughly enjoyed.

Some weren’t people of any stature like the sheepherder of Basque descent in San Jacinto.

He was on the job 24/7 months on end. His employer hauled a trailer out into the sticks provided him with some supplies, handed him a shotgun. He checked on him occasionally but other than that, he was all by himself with the sheep. I used to bring him a 6-pack of beer whenever I saw him.

Then there’s folks like Sandy and Tony Cappelli who founded the non-profit organization Steven’s Hope for Children.

Named after their son who died shortly after being born from a heart defect, the organization provides temporary housing for  children and their families during their outpatient treatment.

Community activist Eddie Dee Smith was also someone I felt blessed to cross path with.

The senior citizen center in Rubidoux is named after her.

I am thankful I got a taste of what I went to college to major in.

Some of my classmates weren’t as fortunate. They got that piece of paper but never found jobs in the industry because of the competitive nature of the profession.

Sadly, the newspaper photojournalist looks to be in danger of being a dinosaur as newspapers look to cheaper means and the general public for their pictures.

That’s more than enough about me in this post.

Please excuse the self-indulgence.

A change of attire for a different mood–Getting different looks for their models is often a goal for photographers. It can be something as simple as letting their hair down and introducing a colored backlight. Here is the setup for the lights.

Before you tear down the set sometimes you have to ask yourself, “What else can I try? I’m already here.”

Everything is already set up. If you have time, you might as well push the envelope and see.

That’s what I really enjoyed about working with Hadia.

She was up for more.

When she produced the paraffin lamps, I was chomping at the bit.

Now we were literally playing with fire and turning up the heat.

If you’re trying this at home, and your model has long hair, have her tie it up for safety sake.

Playing with fire–Photographing these lamps proved to be more of a challenge than I anticipated. The flames were very intense in the first few minutes and then they die down rather quickly, so how do I determine exposure? In this instance, trial and error, I’m afraid. ISO 100 8 seconds aperture between f5.6 and f 11.

The Numbers

Photographing flames is a challenge for different reasons.

Unless the flames are burning gas or some sort of fuel that feeds constantly, your exposure tends to be quite erratic.

The fuel reservoir on the lamp didn’t hold much and it burned with a lot of intensity in the beginning then dissipates very quickly.

Try as I might I couldn’t get predictable results. The solution might have been to use a candle instead of a lamp.

As expected when the flames were roaring, I encountered more ghosting and a warmer color temperature, so shooting both RAW and JPEG gave me more options.

The downside? Of course there is a downside.

The camera took a lot longer to write to the card so I couldn’t shoot as quickly.

Since the flames died down pretty quickly, we had to refill the lamps often.

What was the right White Balance?–Apart from focusing and exposure problems, a good White Balance setting was tricky. When the shutter stayed open longer, there was also “ghosting.”

Have I taken this as far as I can?

Probably not, there’s always room for improvement.

Maybe you can suggest some.