Rings of Fire

Tech Info: Nikno D90 with 70-300 @70mm, ISO 250, f/4.5 for 1/10 of sec.

Digging this from the archives. This was shot during our visit to Hawai and at the Polynesian Cultural Festival. If you visit Oahu, Hawai, then you must include a visit to this place in your itinerary. Its really interesting to see all the different cultures of these islands. I don’t remember which one, but one of the islands main source of food is coconuts. Climbing a coconut tree, grating a coconut didn’t generate a ‘Aww’ from me as I’ve seen it multiple times in our village and even managed to climb on one, but the performance is simply awesome.

We were seated like second or third row from the main dias to watch them perform Breath of Life. The front seating is really great, but the drawback of that was we were too close to the lens I had attached to the camera. Also I was struggling with different settings and most of the times it was a hit/miss thing. In this particular shot, by the time I realized my mistake and re-frame the shot, the performers took a different pose and this is what I landed up with. So I had extract the maximum from this shot. The good part was that I was shooting in RAW by that time and this picture is one example as to how much data is stored in that raw file and if you willing to put little bit of effort in post, you can get most of it.

Processing:

1. Import the raw file in Lightroom and do some basic adjustments to the exposure.
2. Export the image to Photoshop and little bit of cleanup and crop.
3. A curves layer for getting some data back on the performers.
4. Second curves layer for the flames.
5. A tiny bit of noise reduction layer.
6. Resized the image for web and added copyright. Saved it as jpeg.
7. Added metadata and keywords through Bridge.

 
Before:

 
After: