Ring of Fire – The How-To

Ingredients:

1 3/4in copper pipe
50mm lens minimum
DSLR camera
Light source

Even though this technique is old, it still has an amazing effect. When I first saw the ring of fire hitting popular photo blogs and Facebook groups, I was pretty impressed. So I went out to my local hardware store, picked up a copper pipe and went to test this interesting technique out myself.

How does it work? Well, you place the copper pipe just in front of your lens. I did feel pretty stupid holding a copper pipe in front of my lens, but the results were pretty rad.

For these photographs I used my 50mm.

If you would like to wrap your entire subject in the frame, take a step or two back until the ring completely engulfs your subject.

For me, it actually worked better if there was just enough light coming from in-between the leaves of the trees.

In my opinion, this technique is all about experimenting. Different pipes cause different flares. I used the one best accessible to me.

Here are my results.