Candle in the wind

Do you recognize this title? Of course, many of you could remember. This is title of a famous song that sung by Elton John. The song lyrics were altered by Elton John and Bernie Taupin to honor Princess Diana with the famous line Goodbye England’s rose. But it was originally written in 1973 to honor of Marilyn Monroe. Time to time, the lyrics and music were flavored by various artists.  This is a story of the original title.

Candle in the wind

Candle with flame is always beautiful. Many photographers have taken beautiful shots and you could find plenty of images in the internet. I wanted to try candle with flame, but I wanted to bring the flame that should reflect the wind. If I say in simple words, I wanted to capture “candle in the wind”.


Therefore, I made a setup. I placed the candle in an open space where I was careful with background that flash should not reach background object. If so, I could turn background as black, and I don’t need to find black screen. By the way, it was night. There was slow wind and it was ok for flame to bend a little. I used flash in order to bring the candle visible, but limited aperture, shutter speed and ISO as given below. I took several shots (as always) until I got nice flame that reflected the wind. In this image, I was concern about rule of thirds and lead room.

I am happy with the result. However, I would say a suggestion if you try same shot. It is better to use a color candle instead of white. Black background and white candle give a black and white image feeling, except the flame. I tried coloring the candle in Photoshop through selective color techniques, and it was quite nice. Green, purple, red colors were returned nice image.

Camera settings:

• Aperture size: f/5.6
• Shutter Speed: 1/60
• ISO: 400
• Focal length: 55mm
• Flash: Yes

Curry tree fruit

Do you know curry tree? Mostly, it uses for cooking in Indian and Asian cooking as flavor and as well as herbal remedy. Even if you know it, you would not see the fruit. Unripe fruit is reddish and fully ripe fruit is black as it in the picture.

Fortunately, I had light green background which is good for a black image. Actually, I utilized banana leaf as background. The leaf had about 2 meter long distance to the subject. 250 mm lens was good enough to turn the background with better DoF. Therefore, you cannot find distracting spot or marks on the background. I used in-built flash to get better light on the subject. 1.3 m long distance was perfect to the in-built flash. I clicked the image by considering the rule of thirds. Stalk is not in focus due to low number aperture, and shallow DoF is not good for this image. Also, flash reflection on the fruit is another negative factor.

Camera settings are as follows:

• Aperture: f/5.6
• Shutter speed: 1/60
• ISO speed: 200
• Focal length: 250 mm
• Flash: Yes

Main color scheme in this image

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Note: Full resolution image is available at Wikimedia Commons under CC 4.0 license. It has passed Valuable image review. 

Photographing smoking stick

Photographing smoking stick is challenge. I tried a simple method and would like to share with you. I used DSLR with kit lens (18-55 mm). I did not use any materials for background. The background was complete dark night. There was space about 50 meters where camera’s inbuilt flash cannot reach.

Photographing smoking stick

The wind was not strong. Therefore, I could be able to control the smoke by manual blow. I took about 15 shots and satisfy by the above result. The camera settings were as follows:

• Aperture: f/4.5
• Shutter speed:  1/60
• ISO: 200
• Focal length: 36mm
• Flash: On

You could try for Photographing smoking stick and get better results. If you try at studio or better setup, you could get better result. Appearance of burning fire (red color) would be an additional result, and it would make image as live.