Strobist Information: I have seen a couple of really cool ‘match being lit’ photos on Flickr and fancied having a go at it myself. I assumed there would be a million examples in the Strobist group pool with the camera settings and light positions all nicely worked out for me. Despite searching through thousands of pictures I only found one with any useful lighting info (check my favourites) and this had no EXIF information on the camera settings. I decided to just try and work it out myself. There were two main problems as far as I could see. One was positioning the match and the other was lighting it in a way that the match could be held still. Most people seemed to be striking the match in there hand and then holding it in front of the camera. This seemed like a recipe for an out of focus picture so I decided I wanted to clamp the match still and pre focus the camera. This led to the problem of how to light the match. The point at which you want to take the picture is just as the phosphorus ignites in a big ball of fire and smoke. This happens so quickly that trying to strike the match or light it with another match would not give you time to clear the frame before the ideal time to take the picture had passed. The answer lay in a prop I had bought a couple of days earlier to take Show Off. In this picture I used a butane powered soldering iron to give a candle a fake flame. This produces 1300 degrees at the tip of the flame, more than enough to light a match at a reasonable distance. So, for the picture I placed an extra long kitchen match in the clamp of a horizontal reflector arm holder. Under the match I placed the butane torch held in a super clamp on a light stand. There was about a three inch gap between the tip of the flame and the head of the match. On the right of the match I placed an SB-28 with a blue filter and a home made cardboard snoot. The flash was set to 1/16 power 85mm zoom and fired by a PW. The camera was on a tripod and was pre focused on the match head. I set the shooting mode to continuous and attached my remote shutter release. The camera settings were 1/125 sec, f1.8 ISO 100. To take the shot, I set the gas going in the butane torch and held a lighter in one hand and the shutter release in the other. The second I lit the torch, I set the shutter going. With the flash on 1/16 power I could take sixteen shots before the flash needed to recharge although in practice the cameras memory buffer was full after about ten shots. From lighting the torch to the match igniting took about a second. In all I lit 27 matches and the best shot was somewhere in the middle of the pack. I had 40 in the box but there was so much smoke in the room that I was getting dizzy so I decided to call it a night. :) Picture here: How to Light a Match Picture Learn how to light: www.strobist.com