Photos, paintings and animation - Art by Kristen Ankiewicz

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Originally uploaded by artmonstergirl

I updated playafoot.com with a better selection of fire photos, and a new design. All the fire spinner photos are up!

I let Jabba the Frog out of his tank, and he immediately started climbing the nearby lucky bamboo. Go, Jabba, go!

I rented some flash equipment so that I could do rear-sync flash photography. Rear sync flash is when the flash fires at the end of a longish exposure rather than at the beginning. The flash fires right before the shutter closes, capturing whatever that image happens to be at that moment in time. Typically it’s used to create motion effects such as a car’s faded image trailing behind the bright “frozen in time” portion of the image. It’s also used in fire spinner photography, to create trails of light/fire around an image of a non-blurry person.

How to set up remote-triggered strobes

I used a Nikon D300 and two strobes, a Speedlight SB-600 and a Speedlight SB-800.

• On the Nikon D300, in the menu settings, I scrolled down to the pencil –> e) Bracketing flash –> e3) Flash contrl for built-in flash menu. In that menu, I scrolled down until “Commander mode” was selected.
• Within the “Commander mode” menu, I made sure that Built-in flash was set to M 1/128, and that Group A and Group B were both set to M 1/1. By setting the built-in flash to the lowest power I make sure that most of my light comes from my strobes. Your mileage may vary, this is a matter of taste.
• On the SB-600, in order to get to the Commander mode menu, I held down the Zoom and “-” keys simultaneously. From there I made sure Channel 1 and Group A were selected.
• On the SB-800, in order to get to the Commander mode menu, I held down the Select (center) key for a few seconds. I chose Channel 1 and Group A for this strobe also.
• I then set the Nikon D300 to Rear Sync mode, by holding down the flash menu button to the left of the on-camera flash, and using the scroll wheel until “rear” comes up on the display.
• I set an exposure for 2 seconds, positioned my strobes, and ta dah! The on-board flash goes off, I could hear the shutter open, then 2 seconds later the flashes went off.

What it looks like

The above photo shoes my test with 2 second exposure, and a slave strobe on each side (SB-600 and SB-800). I’m moving a small headlamp around in front of me. Later tonight I’ll test the setup on some fire spinners.