Paul is an amazing person. He is humble, sincere and makes his living by dancing with fire and swords. For this shoot we got to have two shoots in one. Some natural light portraiture and of Paul fire dancing. One of our instructors, RC, worked on getting setup a variety of settings in a small location to use as backdrops to showcase Paul’s crazy athletic skills.
As the light fell to twilight, Paul provided an amazing fire show standing out on a shallow sand bar in the ocean. For the first few shots a group of us were using a PocketWizard Flex TT5 in manual mode sharing the commander module. But, the first time that Paul caught the ocean on fire I knew that I couldn’t wait for the shared flash or for the flash to recycle to get my shots. I cranked the ISO (noise be damned) and put myself in shutter priority to try and find a sense of movement that I liked. Once I found a range I liked, I started firing as fast as the camera would shoot.
It was an amazing way to end the workshop in Hawaii. Thanks to Moose, Kevin, Jeff, Sharon, Jake and RC for all the help and support over the week.
All images were captured on a Nikon D700 with a Nikon 70-200mm VRII on Lexar UDMA media.