Colin Coleman

This wedding was on the weekend of July 4th last year. I wanted to do something different to show the time of the year and with my usual bag of gear, I threw in a box of sparkler's. Fast forward to the reception and we had some downtime to do shots of the couple's rings. Now, I didn't tell the couple I was putting their ring directly on a sparkler (risky, but that's what we have to do sometimes) and if you would have looked at us you would see 2 people huddled over a sparkler taking photos like madmen. But they trusted me to do whatever I wanted and that's a lot of the reason why I ended up with this awesome shot.

I wanted to just see the rings, fire, sparkler, sparks and smoke in black so the setup that we used was 2 flashes diagonally facing each other and the rings on the sparkler perpendicular to me. I wanted a simple composition with the sparkle in the middle with the rings hanging. Both flashes were gridded and gelled with magmods. This was also shot in day light around 6pm inside of a garage area. I believe my settings were f/16, iso 3200, 1/200 with my 100L and 5d3. My assistant held the sparkler and lit it while I did my best to get a shot in focus on the macro. You can actually sort of see him on the left ring.