Getting a Good Picture of Burning Coal

Richard:

How do you get a picture with that blue flame color? When I

take a picture the blue seems washed out,but with my eye

the blue is there.Are you using a filter to suppress the red

and orange to enhance the blue? What filter?

Thank You:



BigBarney

Greg (lsFarm) took that picture, its from a very big fire. I'm really not the person to be asking about how to take a picture. I'll split this, there are a few people on here with a lot of photo knowledge.

Edit: that's not exact same one but is from same series he took.

No flash ... that's the only trick.

no flash even eyephone can do it

No Flash, use a tripod if you have to, slow shutter speed (if you can). Time exposure of a second usually works, of course many automatic cameras can be set this way, but at least turn the flash off and hold it steady.

I'd imagine the angle and the nice black background has a lot to do with how good Greg's image looks.

No lights on in the room seems to help too.

If you use a point and shoot digital camera the metering component of the camera will average out the high and low exposure areas and give you an "average" exposure value. With a DSLR (digital single lens reflex) you have an ability to overide the metering system to expose for a particular component in an image.

The problem in capturing the blue flame as you see it is because the meter is being biased by the bright orange coals and causes the meter to underexpose and suppress the deeper blue flames. To get the flames to appear you would need to slightly overexpose an average meter reading so that the blue flames become more visable. The problem with this is that the orange coals will be overexposed.

The problem with nearly all digital cameras is that they do not have the dynamic range that film has. Therefore, there is a compromise on the image output. You can solve the problem by taking a High Dynamic Range, multiple exposure image, from a tripod, and fuse them together in Photoshop or some other HDR specific software.

Stephen

I will try all these suggestions and see where it takes me.

My boiler has a secondary air feed throttle valve on the side so thats

where I shot the pictures thru,I may remove the valve to get a better

shot. I burn bituminous coal and am able to always get a blue flame

but the hot red coals always over power the blue ladies.

Would any filter help?


Thank You;

BigBarney

[quote="BigBarney"]
Would any filter help?
[quote]

Not really. Then again.... if you have a DSLR and you have a split neutral density filter (half clear/half 2 f-stop ND filter http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/5 ... uated.html) you could rotate the ND part of the filter on the lens over the orange flames to reduce their impact on the film/sensor. This would give a more realistic dynamic range to the scene but it would require a little effort to work properly. But it could be done provided the blue ladies were dancing evenly above a horizontal layer of orange coals.

In a black and white image you could use a blue filter to pass that spectrum of light to the film/sensor... but wouldn't that defeat the original intent?

Stephen