Through my local guide in Bali, Indonesia, a man whom I've worked with for 20 years, I found a new and beautiful location to photograph the Kecak Fire Dance. This dance is a very unique, very stylized dance that tells the story of the Ramayana, the epic Sanskrit poem from ancient India and one of the most important legends of Hinduism. I hired the dance company for a private performance for my photo tour group because this allowed us to walk anywhere as the dancers were performing. This afforded us the best compositions. Most of these dance performances are done for tourists, and often the dancers are surrounded by dozens or even hundreds of people. This obviously doesn't yield good pictures. I asked the dance company to start the performance as soon as the sun dropped low enough in the sky so there was no direct sunlight on the performers. You can see a little orange glow on the trees. We did have nice color in the sky, but I made it better by replacing the sky in Photoshop. I used a 16mm wide angle lens for this shot, and my settings were 1/250, f/8, and 1000 ISO.
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