This photo was the result of a school project for Jen. She needed a prop to use in English class while reciting “Fire and Ice” by Robert Frost. The asignment is to get in front of the class with a prop and recite the poem. She was searching for a prop and I said what about ice on fire? Her response was, “you can do that?” I said, “I think we can in a photo”. So we were off to see what we could do.
The problem with burning ice is pretty obvious – it doesn’t burn. So, that’s going to be high on the list of things we’ll have to figure out. Another issue is, even if we get ice to burn fire puts out a lot of light and ice doesn’t put out any. That makes for a light balancing problem and that sounds like fun.
So here’s how we did it. I have some old black tile in the garage from a project last summer. We cleaned up the tile and put it on the glass patio table. Next, we found some black paper to sweep up behind the tile and we had a nice basic black setup that would put up with a little bit of fire.
Now to make that ice burn. Okay, freezing kerosene is out, so is using Methane hydrates. So we had to cheat a little. We took a cotton ball and soaked it with charcoal lighter fluid. The idea was to surround the cotton ball with ice and light it up! The plan was taking shape but we know we still had a light balancing problem. If the fire is burning but the ice isn’t then the ice is going to be dark or worse – just not visible. Here is an example of just the fire burning but without the flashes added. 
So we need to light the ice separate from the fire (which lights itself.) Bring in the speed lights. We took two speed lights and fitted them with DIY grid snoots and mounted one on a light stand and the other was hand held. Both lights were on as low of power as possible. Not because we didn’t want much light but because we wanted the light to not last long. The lower the power setting on the flash the shorter the duration of the flash. The idea is that because the two flashes are going to be waaaayyy brighter than the little flame from the cotton ball, we have to light the picture twice. Which really won’t be hard because the flash will light the ice for a very, very short time – probably somewhere around 1/10,000 of a second. During this short flash duration, the flame will be invisible. But the shutter will be open for 1/250 of a second and the flame will get almost all of that time to light up the camera’s sensor. We practiced using some stones as a stand in for the ice. Once we got the lighting and exposure dialed in we swapped the stones for ice and got the shot we wanted. The result is one photograph lighted twice!
Here is the setup shot for the “Fire and Ice” photo. The photo was actually taken with the lights off!
