About the image

For this shot, I lit steel wool on fire to create sparks encircling an engaged couple against a background of high mountain stars in Sun Valley, Idaho. In addition to the light from the molten metal, which was spun by my brother-in-law dressed in all black behind the couple, and the long exposure for the ambient light and stars, I added a single off-camera flash (with a softbox) on camera left. The couple was dressed in leather to reduce the chance of burns. And yes, the police did arrive on scene after seeing the sparks from hundreds of yards away, but after explaining what I was doing, they quickly became a willingly complicit part of the spectator crowd :-).