Ready, aim ... FIRE!

We went over to the Crucible's annual Fire Arts Festival last night, and a warm evening in the East Bay was made even hotter by the dozens of exhibits and art pieces that spew, blew, belched or just plain blasted fire into the night.

The gala takes place in a parking lot across the street from the Crucible and in the shadow of some elevated BART tracks. You can't help but wonder what the people aboard  the train think when they look out the window, and instead of seeing dull concrete condominium boxes, they see a 30-foot tall woman reaching to the sky, fire emanating from her innards. (Dan Das Mann and Karen Cusolito's "Epiphany" piece.)

This is the eighth version of the Fire Arts Festival, and it's a big fundraiser for the Crucible. There were lots  families from the local community roaming around, and many of them had been given free admission by the festival as a neighborly gesture.

The show-stopper is Sean Orlando's  Steampunk Treehouse,  which was built at the Crucible and made its debut in Black Rock City  last year. It's a beautiful piece, gorgeous and inspiring in so many ways, large and small. You have to pay a bit more and come in as a patron to be able to go up in it, but you get a fabulous view and a close-up look at the detail work that makes the Treehouse so special.

(Sean Orlando)

If you're going, don't forget your camera. And if, like me, you often keep your exposure settings on aperture priority (or some other automatic function), this will be a good time to experiment and hone your manual-control skills. The reason is the all the fire around.

Your camera is quicker than you are when it comes to reading a scene and reacting instantly to changing light conditions. So while your exposure might have been correct when you looked through the viewfinder and took a reading, if a blast of fire takes place while you're actually snapping the picture, it's going to throw everything off. You'll see the flame in your picture, but everything else will be dark. Why? Because even though your camera is quick, it is dumb, too. It will average ALL the light in the picture, including the burst of flame, to make a "proper" exposure.

But you really don't want a "proper" exposure. You want the flame to be very very bright, and you want to keep enough ambient light to show the scene. So experiment a little. Take your readings on automatic when there is no fire in your scene. Note the fstop and shutter speed, then switch to manual control. Then when the fire blasts, it'll show up in your picture the way you want it to.