Well, finally me and Sam (Insomniac have managed to get together again to shoot something, it has been a while.
This was a lot of fun to do, and it was meant to be just a test shot, since we've never done this before.
Idea and concept go all to Sam, he remembered this one.
The sparks are created by burning steel wool.
This is dangerous, so please use at your own risk, and be careful.
We tied a piece of steel wool to the end of a steel wire, and then we set it on fire.
Steel wool doesn't exactly burn, it instead melts, but it's so thin that the reaction is very quick and strong.
Give it enough oxygen and it will produce huge sparks.
So just get a wooded shirt, some eyes and hand protection and then swirl the wool in circles, as you can see from the scale, the sparks were over 30-feet high!
Since we had no idea if it was going to be strong or not, we chose an isolated beach, where no fire hazards were present.
Then it's just a long exposure, about 15 to 30 seconds, and the result is this.
Much better examples if you google for "burning steel wool".
A couple of outtakes from that day:
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Congratulations my friend, great to see you back in the top 10 where you belong.
To anyone thinking about playing around with this idea, take João's advice seriously: two small sparks landed on my (cleverly) unprotected hand and the burns are only now just about healed.
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