Portraits and Sparks.

As you all already know, I really love doing low light photography. Being able to "control" the light is just so much fun, and it gives the picture a whole different feel. Yesterday my little brother and I found a pack of sparklers, and we had some fun with them while I snapped some pictures.

 

This first picture is probably my favourite. I changed it to sepia to allow the viewer to focus more on the contrast between the light and dark, without it being muddled up by colours rather than shades in between. What I love most about this picture is the contrast between the clear and bright sparkler and the slightly blurred and grainy Caiden in the background, giving the picture depth, texture, and value. Also, the way he is concentrating on the sparkler is pretty cute, a definite bonus. :)
  I had the ISO on my camera set to 1600, making it extra sensitive to the light of the sparkler, which was actually the only light source in the room. My shutter speed was 1/25 of a second, still fast enough to capture the individual sparks, but not too fast that it didn't have enough time to capture the light the picture needed.

 

For this picture I set the ISO for 800, with the same shutter speed as the first. However looking back, the difference in the lighting of the pictures is not that different, save for that the first one was a bit more grainy (which, again, is not necessarily a bad thing).

 

Doing this was a lot of fun, and a bit of a nice challenge too. There was lots of stuff that I had no control over (you can't tell a sparkler how to pose, for example, or which direction to shoot those fiery little sparks), and you can also see a few of my beloved "sun spots". So overall I was very happy with the way that they turned out.