Fire Dancer @ the Park - 8/9/2012

We had another Hawaii Photographic Society outing. This time it was at a Fire Dance performance at the Waterfront Park and I had no idea what to expect. We got there around 8pm as it was DARK. The only light source were yellow lights from the lamp post up the hill and from the office of the Medical School building in the background.  CD and I found a place to sit and saw others in shadows arriving. There was music DJ/Mixer under a tent and it was like a party.  After a little while, I saw someone light a fire..I took a few shots but ALL were dark. So, I figure the best way was to shoot it like fireworks. I had my tripod and used bulb setting w/ my remote.  The effects were pretty cool and turned out to be an awesome photographic experience.

It took a few shots to figure out I had to use manual focus and then all I did was click.  It was unpredictable where the dancer was moving towards and she was moving a lot so all I got was a trail of light.

As the torch was losing it's fire,I got these slight light trails w/ my log exposure.  This was created by just one dancer swinging a ball lit on fire.

I decided to play around taking shots without the tripod and move my camera around.. It made some really psychedelic light pattern from the light of the Medical School building, the red light of the music tent and the fire dancer.

I even made these curves just moving my camera up and down and across.  There were so many creative things you can do.

We met up with others members that came.  At some point, I saw some flashes go off and I caught some of it in this shot.

It was really hard to catch the performers with w/ the torch. I even tried covering my lens w/ a cloth to see what it'll do..Here are two performers at once.

I switched to using my 50mm lens and one performer came close and I caught this moving flame.

I think this was like a hula hoop thing that was set on fire...not sure..it happened so fast..

Then we saw this other hula hoop that was lit by LCD lights.  I hand held this shot and the lights from the fancy hula hoop came out even more cool..

This is the same hula hoop.. soo cool that I wanna get me one!

There was also this girl who was swinging two color LCDs tied to a sting.. I also hand held this shot ..

I tried getting some shots of the torch.  It was hard to time the light to not get blurry people and I got some lucky shots.