bonfire dinner

Most Tuesday evenings, several of us from work rotate hosting dinner.  This week, Becky invited us over for dinner and a bonfire.  I was excited about the photo possibilities of the bonfire but was also pleasantly surprised by the great light.  I am starting to really love this “into the light” look.

There are two ways to meter your camera to get this type of shot; one is to manually expose for the shadows (actually a little under helps) but if you use Aperture Priority or the like, you point your camera down at the ground (so that the sun is out of the shot) lock your exposure, recompose to include the bright sky, and then take the shot.

Adam invited us to climb his “not quite finished but still supper cool” tree house.  Well it is more like a tree-deck.  I jumped at it after he said he had a little flashlight and Grete was tricked into climbing all the way up.  Key light is a keychain LED camera left held by my beautiful assistant (Adam.)

Once the light levels dropped to actually make it look like it was night, I seized my opportunity to make the bonfire as bright as I could and then shot away.  This really pushed the limits of my camera and makes me want to buy even faster glass…but that is another debate.