In the best of conditions, fire is one of the most challenging elements to capture. Not only is it dangerous, its luminosity varies with time. Long exposures result in motion blur, and the high contrast between subject and flames typically means that an amazing camera with a large dynamic range is necessary.

Despite living for new exciting challenges — I was a little worried. Though I am a photographer, I am used to shooting with high end cameras like my 33,000$ Mamiya Leaf Credo 80 to create my surreal art pieces.

To make things even more challenging, Sean Sim, the Executive Creative Director of the project presented me with three additional rules for the photographs that I would have to follow:

You must use the phone’s Light-Painting function The model must be surrounded by fire Absolutely no photoshop allowed

Planning and prepping fire tools with Starlight Alchemy — Shot on the Huawei P8

Could It Work?

That was the first question I had to answer, and the only way to do that especially on an unreleased phone was to actually do them in person. We invited fire performance team Starlight Alchemy to assist us with some critical tests one cold evening off in Shanghai and prepare for the ultimate test: Was it even possible to capture the fiery images we had in our minds using just a smartphone?

After about an hour of testing using some of the original P8 engineers as stand-in models, and some simple ND filters, I felt confident. Yes, this was going to be possible.