A short tutorial on capturing the initial flare of a lit match & creating unique & interesting images in post processing. For all those pyromaniacs out there
The first step is to capture the flare of a sparked match
Setup & Equipment:
- Clothes peg as a small clamp to hold the match in place.
- Setup camera on tripod & manually focused on the match head
- Shots were taken in low light with either EF50mm f/1.8 II or EF24-105mm f/4L IS
(had success with both)
- Manual settings around 1/8000 sec, f/6.3, ISO 400 to 800
- Remote release & burst mode
(40D ideal for this with 6.5 fps)
- I tried striking the match at first but lost my focus to easily so then used a lighter to heat the match until it flared/lit.
(The trick there is timing your shutter release & keeping the lighter flame out of the shot).
OK now you have your initial capture..
Next lets do some post processing:
- Crop into the shot & blow up the image. (Maybe a Macro lens could be used to take these but don’t have one. Shot in RAW so didn’t have a prob blowing these up).
- I play about with saturation, sharpness, vibrance & contrast in Photoshop until happy.
- To create the more interesting patterns, it is just a case of copying & pasting the same image on itself, flipping one layer either horizontally or vertically & blending them (again in Photoshop).
And the result of blending the 'mirror' image is unique every time.
Some are scary...
Some are like flowers..
I like the fact that no 2 are the same - there are other examples on my Flicker
I am sure this could be done many different ways & would love to hear if anyone has questions, suggestions or tries it for themselves.
Thanks for watching.