Onegav

Hmmmm, maybe September Sun is a little bit of a strong description for todays photograph; it wasnt exaclty cracking the flags today!

Either way, it was nice out today, certainly nice enough to eat outdoors, and enjoy a nice mid September BBQ.

We love our BBQ’s, all of us, and the girls especially get all giddy when we suggest having a BBQ to them! There is someting really nice about eating outside, and especially if your cooking outside too. Its a similar feeling to doing a long fishing trip, where you live on the bank of the lake for a couple of days. The food isn’t normally as good when I’m fishing, but still, you just cant beat being outdoors.

I know I’ve photographed the BBQ before, a few weeks ago, but that was slightly different and I took and image of the coal burner; however I didn’t think I quite caught the essence of a fire built for cooking, in those photographs, so I thought I’d have another go, and why not!

I really like this nice, wide shot, with the flames lapping around the base of the coals, the smoke pouring off to the left and the white fire lighter, guilty of starting the whole thing; partially at least, anyway.

In this one, I wanted to capture the smoke itself, and some of the patterns it creates as it drifts through the air. In the final image, I really like the glow of the coals that have started early too.

In quite a few of the shots you can see the sparks coming off the wood base I gave the fire, and I tried to listen out for them and position myself so that I could capture them. I was a little cautious though, not wanting to get my camera too close as the fire built up its heat.

It was the 50mm prime all the way today, naturally for such a fun and close quaters subject; and just look at the depth of field it can acheive in the image above! It enabled me to pretty much pick out the white fire lighter block and isolate it from everything else, even though there are flames and smoke all around it.

Learnings – today was a bit of fun really, fun with the 50mm. BBQ’s are fun aren’t they, so it just makes sense to me! I did try and get a few angles with the sun beaming through the back of the BBQ, but I was asking too much of my lens and camera to take it in one shot hand held, and I couldnt get the highlights down low enough. A tripod and some exposure bracketing might have done the trick, but I wasn’t bothered, it was plenty of fun chasing the sparks around the coals!