I love playing around and trying new things and this was close to the top of the photography bucket list: SPARKLER PHOTO SESSION!!!!

I brought my 2 interns along, Jessi & Amanda, and my social media partner, Mary.  Friends of mine (cute ones, too!) were willing to stand and model- even without knowing how long this would take :)

We had our checklist:

• 10:00pm
• 144 sparklers ready to go
• lighter
• jar of water for 'dead' sparklers (don't litter!)
• flashlights (headlamps worked best since we all had so many things to do for each shoot!)  AND the headlamps had a red-light option so I didn't seem to cast any light into my viewfinder (that could mess up the shot)
• tons of batteries for flashes & cameras
• tripods (15 second-long exposures!!!)

I did a lot of research before that night but there were some surprises that we weren't prepared for...

• Bats
• giant bugs (thank you, Amanda, for saving us with bugspray!)
• some of us wore white so we couldn't be the "sparkler writer" (Mary & Jessi did amazing jobs being SW's, it's really hard!!!)

We had no 'directions' one how to make this happen so we had to start somewhere... which made this:

20 minutes and 35 sparklers later.... we were starting to get the hang of it....kind of (ha!)  We may have popped the flash at the wrong time. OOPS



then...magic at 10:45pm.   

We had do much fun, we can't thank Justine & Nathan enough for kissing for 2 hours in the dark while we played around them!!!!  
And YES, I'd TOTALLY do this again with another willing client!!!!!!

Here's a breakdown of the shot:
ISO 800
f/22 (manual focus before the shot, flashlights used to light up faces to focus on)
15" exposure (with a 2sec. timer since I'm too cheap to buy a remote)
We exposed the couple with a flash FIRST and then let our "sparkler writer" do their magic for the rest of the shot