Fire dancing

I took some pictures of the fire dancer at Second Saturday a couple of nights ago–she was using a hula hoop internally lit by colored LEDs that had flaming wands attached to it. She was absolutely AMAZING. More pictures are in the gallery here. Oh, and these were intentionally long exposures–I wanted a motion blur. However, I had my 50mm lens on the camera, and I wanted a shallow depth-of-field, so I ended up at ISO 100 and overexposing them just to get the shutter speed down low enough to capture what I wanted, since that lens can practically see in the dark at its low end (f/1.4) and it was still too fast to get what I wanted. Thank goodness for being able to drop the exposure in post-processing.  :-)

This is my favorite shot of the bunch, and I knew it the second I took it. Not sure how I did... sometimes that just happens.

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She looks like she's having so much fun... Not sure I'd be having a good time with a fiery hula hoop, but she was a pleasure to watch.

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I love the clarity of this shot and the look of rapt concentration on her face. Not bad given that I had my left elbow crooked and my left hand holding onto my right shoulder, with my camera propped on my outstretched elbow to use it as a tripod of sorts.

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The neck, the neck, the neck is on fire... (sorry, song reference... it's not that obscure, is it?)

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Long exposure meant that it looks like she has multiple sets of arms. So so so neat.

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