February 6, 2013

Fireworks and Skateboarding Sparkler Art

Pyro and sparkler art go together like cheese and ham but adding in the prospect of photographing someone travelling on a skateboard too and you need some special handling of the situation. Come on down David Lehl, lifestyle photographer from Denver, Colorado who takes on the unusual and not uncommonly, the downright dangerous in his work.

In this instance, the idea was to photograph skateboarding with a difference and he certainly captured it perfectly.

His original idea was to use smoke bombs both in front of the flash and behind the skater to create some brilliant atmospheric imagery which came out pretty well. But, he wanted more so the next idea was to strap sparklers to the skateboard to create sparks for the ‘grind’ trick which came out beautifully.

Using a long exposure (2s f/5.6) to capture the light trails created by the sparklers and then do exactly the same trick again but this time photograph with a flash he took the shot with 1/1000s f5.6 exposure to freeze the image. As you can see, highly successful and some fabulous shots too.