I found myself in a hotel room, sightly drunk of course, with nothing to do. Handily, I’d lugged a flash and some EL wire along for the ride, and to bastardize the Hitchhiker‘s quote “you’re never alone with EL wire”.
My weird mind led me to the conclusion that I should spend the evening trying to capture a suicide attempt being hidden by a bed fire. It seemed simple enough, but it took me two hours of trying to get it right. Well, right ish.
Firstly, where to put the flash? I hung it overhead on the fan. I hung it off the TV opposite the bed. I hung it off the back of a chair. I even tried it under my body. In the end, the shot was from the dresser directly into my face, set at 1/64th power, with a nice little snood to hold the light locally.
Burning the bed is easy of course, you wave EL wire around until you get bored or the camera clicks. I was using ISO200, f3.5 for 45 seconds so I had plenty of time. I set the flash in rear sync mode. This means that if fires and the END of the exposure instead of the beginning as is normal. I did this because I wanted the bright white flash light to erase the burning orange EL wire and to reveal my face. Had I left the flash to fire at the beginning, I’d have drawn all over myself.
Here’s how you recreate the image
1) open the shutter
2) wave EL wire around to burn your hotel room
3) after 30 seconds, jump on the bed and stick your dead man’s tongue out. Roll your eyes if you can
4) the flash fires removing the flames from your head and you’re done!
As for photoshop I did a couple of things. I played with the blackness setting to give the flames a more realistic red heat map. I tweaked the colour temperature of my head to make me look a little more dead. And finally, I cloned in a few extra flames from previous attempts. In all the shutter clicked 47 times. You can see some of the failures below. Click for large as always.
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