Fire Play Photo Shoot

[shantell]

I'm thinking of calling my collection "Graphic Content" on account of the colour treatments paired with the subject matter. I'm gradually learning my way around Photoshop and have been playing with curves and colour balance in order to distort my images and make them much more graphic and high-contrast.

Here's a detail shot I took during a fire play session. Lighting was a bit tricky. I had a blue LED overhead, and the light from the fire itself. I turned off my white LED rim lighting for this one. I had to take photos in bursts because of the nature of the shoot. Fire doesn't pose, and it doesn't want to stay in frame. In addition, the fire top's hands were moving quickly, and it was difficult to obtain a clear photo without a lot of blur.

Here's my original, unedited image.



I cropped the image in order to tighten up the composition. The position of the leg/flame and the arm create an intersection at the centre of the image, directing the eye to the action. The focal point is the tip of the fire wand, which, in turn, directs the eye toward the fire cup.

I used curves to create colour distortion and increase the contrast. The colour treatment and contrast makes it connect with the other photos in the series, even though the colour palette is different.

Here's what I came up with:



This is closer to what I want, but not quite there, so I repeated the process, tinkering a bit with hue balance.