Message posted by lone wolf on March 06, 2005 at 17:19:09 PST:

Pyrotechnics lastly longer than 4 hours requires immediate medical attention.

Getting back to the color of the flames, it depends how the metering is done. Most cameras set the exposure when you press the shutter release halfway. You can tell by the sharpness of the plane relative to the background that Joerg was tracking the plane as it approached. [This is a good technique if you expect to pull a tail number off the image.] Assuming he pressed the shutter release part way while tracking the plane and then snapped the picture when the pyro went off, the exposure doesn't take the light from the flames into account. This often makes the flames a bit overexposed, so they more orange then reddish orange. If the exposure is set while the flames are present, everything else but the flames looks kind of dark because the flames are not reflecting light, but rather emitting light, and lots of it. Between the two cases, more people would prefer the plane and background to set the exposure (as was done here). The expection to this rule would be if you were photographing live bombing, where it is cool to see debris floating in the flames. Generally if the camera is in "servo" mode, it will set the exposure at the instance the photograph was taken.

If you set up the camera for a rapid sequence of images, i.e. a mode where holding down the shutter releas takes photographs as fast as possible, the next photograph will most likely be a bit darker since the fire is now in the exposure matrix.

In Reply to: Re: certain substances? posted by CoyoteUgly on March 06, 2005 at 16:54:29 PST:

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