Playing with fire...

Experimenting with fire, this is as taken, no editing or cropping. What do you think? Does it work? Does it need any editing?

Personally I prefer the red glow of the embers. It appears the ambient light is too bright to get a good feel of the heat that is likely to be in there. I do like the red glow/reflection in the very center, so a good cropping in might help.
With lower ambient light, you'll probably pick up more flame not otherwise visible as well. I think if you have the chance, try again later in the day.

I played around with it for a bit and cropped it down to zero in on the larger area of flame. I liked the way it focused on viewing the embers through the fire.
Then again, I like the contrast of the black and white embers and the yellow flame, and cropping as such took most of that away.

Feel free to mark this comment as extremely unhelpful.

great idea....but keep shooting and experimenting.
glowing red embers, hot ash...colored flames, heat waves... those are what I'd expect to see in fire images.

this one is sharp, bright, and detialed, but not very interesting to look at. No sense of "I'm right there in the fire".... know what I mean?

The existing colours, contrast, exposure and focus all look good to me but it just needs some more red in there somewhere as mentioned. A very good start though, lets see some more of your experiments!

Vic.

Thanks guys. BBQs are not something I have much opportunity to shoot and I didn't want to melt my camera!

Next time I will bear all these comments.

I remembered this post, last night I was at a bbq and decided to get a shot or two for you...
have you had any chances to get more images? here's an example showing what I was talking about...





start out with a longish shutter speed 1/8 sec or more till you get some motionblur in the flames, dial down your aperture to keep the highlights, then add some fill flash to get some sharpness in the flames and some detial in the shadows.
no two fires are alike, so experiment!

Haha, at first I thought you were roasting a crocodile! Turns out it's just a log.

The first shot is nice but I'd like to see a greater range of colours rather than just black/shades of grey and orange. I think it lacks some yellow and red shades.

Vic.

Heres a few I have taken, as the others have said you need to get those glowing embers to stand out.

[IMG]http://i184.photobucket.com/albums/x261/ClarkyinAus/IMGP2414.jpg[/IMG]

[IMG]http://i184.photobucket.com/albums/x261/ClarkyinAus/IMGP0830.jpg[/IMG]

There you go, a better range of "Fire" colours Clarky! I like number two. I must have a go at this when I get round to building a forge - I went on a beginners course on Blacksmithing a little while back. I've bought an Anvil, and some more hammers and I've been buying charcoal cheap as it's way past barbeque time here. Just need to build something hot now!

Vic.

........glowing embers in this one

[IMG]http://i148.photobucket.com/albums/s30/Hyram_Hare/IMGP0499-1.jpg[/IMG]

(photograph courtesy of Belinda B.)