Candle Light

A bit of a first for me posting a small series of photo's, I'd be interested in any c&c's, taken with K-5, DFA 100mm and AF080C ring flash.
My favourite is #4, it's the image I was trying to capture, just after the candle is blown out and the wisp of smoke.

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#4

I'd second Gareth's tip there. Candlelight is all about the ambient lighting it gives. Having something in the background helps as well e.g. silhouettes, blurry faces, smoke.

I agree - dump the flash for pics with candlelight. Bracketed shots carefully blended using layers and soft eraser work well rather than HDR software based solutions.

Thanks for the c&c's I'll give the tripod and ambient light a go, see how I get on.

Maybe a *little* extra light (other than that provided by the flame) is needed, so that you don't have just a flame surrounded by blackness (or total blackness in the last shot), or an overexposed, blurred flame.

But the frontal lighting, which has a different colour temp to the candle light, is not so attractive, I agree with the others. You could gel the flash and move it to the side/behind the candle, or add some additional candles out of shot to cast a little bit more light onto the wick.

So thanks everyone, had another go taking on board your comments, thanks to Gareth for the shaped aperture trick, thought I'd give that try.

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#6

Wow, impressive! Looks gorgeous.