My friend Mr H has an interesting hobby, he likes to play with fire. Not arson or anything nasty like that, but fire poi, fire staffs that sort of thing. So given my resolution to do more night time photography it seemed like a natural thing to ask him if he fancied some photos. Fortunately he did and we were soon out having fun in the dark…
He has various bits of kit but we only used 3 on the night. We started with the light poi giving him a chance to warm up and me to work out the best settings for the camera. Obviously if you’re taking shots like this you could use one of the preset modes, but these are rely on the camera’s light metering system being used to select at least some of the settings and are therefore unlikely to give results. So it was manual settings all the way.
Once we were both happy the real fun started with the Fire! It’s difficult to believe how much heat, noise and smell these give off. That said, even though you know that’s fire sailing through the air it’s hard not to grin.
We used two separate locations close to where we live. In fact those lights in the background form the village and it’s adjacent town (which is tiny and smaller than our village) just across the waters of the river. I thought it made a wonderful backdrop.
Once the fuel in the poi ran out we moved onto his fire staff. I know Mr H was worried that this would be the least spectacular as ‘well you can only really twirl it around’ but he hadn’t mentioned that the twirling would be about him! He twirled it in his hands, then started twirling it round his arms and neck…. then started throwing it up in the air, where it would twirl in beautiful arcs, before seamlessly catching it and continuing to spin it around his body.
It’s was great fun and really affirmed my belief that I should do more night time photography. Thanks Mr H, you were a star 
