When I was clearing out my late father’s old art studio (that eventually became my photographic studio) a piece of sheet metal used to block up a hole in the door was made redundant when I carried out a more permanent fix. I kept it because I was aware that it was an old enamel advertising sign for paraffin, and I hate to throw such things away. A few weeks ago, with the constant media attention to rising fuel costs, I thought that it may become a topical photograph in its own right. But then I started to formulate a plan to photograph it with a paraffin lamp which I had already put to one side as a potential still-life prop.
So, after clamping the sign in an upright position, I placed the lamp in front but slightly to the left to allow the word ‘paraffin’ to show. The problem was that this made the image a little one-sided and so I placed a brown-glass bottle to the right to balance things out. I managed to get the wick of the lamp damp with the remnants of fuel that fortunately remained in the lamp and, after trimming the wick so that it was even, I lit it and adjusted the wick’s height to get a small, but constant, flame.
Using any type of artificial light would have destroyed the effect of the flame and so I took a series of test shots at different shutter speeds to find one that gave the desired result and concluded that 15 seconds was the optimum.
There was little post-processing apart from removing some of the more obvious rust spots on the sign, a bit of dodging of the shadows on the lamp and bottle and a slight graduated darkening of the foreground.
Ironbridge Images 