Photo 280 out of 365 – “Glass on Fire”

"Glass on Fire" - Settings: ISO 1600, f/10, 1/800 sec, 24-105mm lens (105mm)

Yesterday I went out to Long Island with Ben to hang out and take photos/video at his glass-blowing studio.  Though I took a bunch of photos, I actually enjoyed filming more.  I think it’s more exciting to watch the process in motion.  That being said, I love how this picture came out.

This was a great exercise for me in shooting in 100% manual mode.  I’ve been practicing that a bit more lately, but most of the time I shoot in aperture-priority mode (AV) – and then change it to manual if I’m not liking the result.  In this situation, I quickly found that if I exposed the shot correctly according to the meter, the white-hot fire and burning, glowing glass, were totally blown out in the pictures.  So, I switched to manual mode and had to completely under-expose the shots in order to get the detail within the fire.  When I did that, however, the background was totally black and under-exposed.  It is a trade-off I guess, and I experimented with lots of different exposure settings.  Sometimes it was more important for me to capture Ben and his surroundings, so I didn’t care if the fire and glass were blown – but in this instance, I wanted to capture the beautiful detail towards the bottom of the flame as well as the glowing piece of glass with all those little bubbles.  I didn’t re-touch this photo at all in Lightroom.  This is exactly how it was shot.

I do have even MORE of an appreciation for what Ben does now.  His pieces are so artistic and now I know how delicate he has to be when putting them together and adding color and design.  He gave me a brief lesson and I made a little pendant, which is now hanging around my neck… but it was super challenging!

Over the next week or two, I plan on editing together a short video from all the footage I took and I will post it here!

Oh – and I saw another smiley face at the studio:

Smiley Face Tool

Now it’s off to Woodside, Queens for a delicious Thai dinner at Sripraphai with Dan & Yvonne!  Yummmmmmmm.