Flaming Tetherball

Flaming Tetherball was invented by Rusty Oliver at HazardFactory, and it’s a heck of a lot of fun.   It’s a roll of toilet paper soaked in just the right amount of white gas, on the end of a cable.

I haven’t shot it on film in a while, so I gave it another go.   To get the exposure approximately right, I shot it on digital first, at the same ISO as the film I brought, 400.   I was shooting manual exposure, so I just transferred all the settings over to my Canon Elan 7ne with the same lens & flash as I used on my Canon 6D.  Yeah, this is kinda cheating, but typically, you need to shoot a lot of photos of this to get a good one.  And I only brought a few rolls of film.

I shot at f/6.3, to make sure the person was in focus, … about 0.4 seconds, to get the flame trail of the fire, and the flash at about 1/4 power.    I always shoot with center-spot focus, and rear-button focus, so the camera wasn’t trying to focus before every shot.   I’d aim the camera at the ground near the person, or on the person themselves, and leave it focused like that for the next few shots, hoping the distance between us didn’t change too much, and the DOF would cover for it.

Here’s the best shot.

And the rest:

I guess next I’ll have to try it on medium format.  🙂