Fierce fire

Deep fire within the coal.

This picture was shot in July in 2015, in the gardens of the castle in Arcen in the Netherlands. Each year, an art and photography fair is organized there. Due to the fact that my parents were on holiday near that place, we decided to bring them a visit which was a good excuse to visit the fair in Arcen 🙂

On the fair, I was struck by the work of one of the exposing photographers and would like to give him some attention. His name is Wil Westerweel and specializes in urbex photography. Very noteworthy!! Please pay a visit to his site: https://wilwesterweelfotografie.nl/. I have tried to recreate the atmosphere of his photo’s when I was in Sweden. That photo will be published later.

Getting back to this image.
On the fair, there was a ironworker (quite a figure!) busy creating magnificent art from pieces of metal. Those pieces were molded by hammers after they were scorched in the fire. That day, I mainly used my 50mm lens and consequently, I ended up using that one here. When I was looking at the work that was done, I was mesmerized by the hammers coming into contact with force with the iron. The small parts were flying off. Trying to get that on film did not turn out the way I wanted. Suddenly I saw the fire in the coals and thought it would be a nice composition with the blacks of the coal and the white of the fierce heat.

I wanted to make it a sort of a macro shot with a fairly shallow depth of field. Therefore, I set the aperture rather low and matched the other settings with an ISO of 100 to have enough room to counteract any movement in the shot that was made from hand. In post-processing, nothing was altered; the photo is as it was shot.
When you look at the photo, you could really imagine the heat that was coming from it. Luckily I did not use a macro lens… that would have melted away 🙂 Anyway, the picture triggers the imagination of experiencing heat and that is also what I wanted to achieve with this impulsive photo!

Camera settings:

Location