I conduct two workshops per year to photograph poison dart frogs and exotic reptiles. I hire two men to bring and manage the animals for my group, and one them, Ross, also performs as a fire-breather. He now gives my workshop group a show after dark. It's an amazing thing to see, and the pictures everyone gets are just fantastic. We do it in the parking lot of the hotel where the workshop is conducted. The biggest challenge, of course, is correct exposure. The goal is to make the background black with no detail, and at the same time it was important not to overexpose the fireball. I also wanted to hold detail on Ross' face and his black outfit. This was not an easy thing to do, and it took several test shots to arrive at the correct settings. For this picture, I used 1/400th of a second, f/8, and 640 ISO. I used a 24-105mm lens and no tripod. For the reflection, I added that in post-processing with the Photoshop plug-in Flood. My next frog workshop is Nov. 14-15 in St. Louis, Missouri.
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