Mount Ogi Fire Festival, Beppu

The image above is of Mount Ogi, Beppu during the fire festival. It was quite a challenge to take this shot. The fire is lit at the top of this triangle and flames slowly creep down the sides and then burn inwards over the course of around an hour. If you were to take a single photo for a few seconds you get an unimpressive thin line of fire on a large mountainside. The secret is to use a long shutter speed or shoot multiple exposures on the same roll of film. Both techniques are tricky but as I had forgotten to pack a shutter release I opted for the second method. I shot a 4 second exposure then without winding the film onto the next frame I cocked the shutter. (How to do this varies between cameras. With the Pentax 67II you hold the multi-exposure lever while turning the wind lever.) I repeated this 4 second exposure on the same piece of film every 4 minutes until the fire had finished. There were a total of around 20 different exposures on the same piece of film. I am sure I will return to this event in the future and try a single one hour exposure, but I’m pretty happy with the way this image came out.

I’ve put up a slightly larger version of this image on my Flickr account here.