Fire and Ice

Fire and Ice, originally uploaded by marush1.

Trying to get the two components together was a big challenge. In the end I suspended a match in an ice cube tray and froze it. The next step was to work out the lighting. I decided that any form of side lighting I could produce wouldn't work and the ice cube had to be lit from below. To achieve this took a flashgun and covered it with a Honl blue gel. To this I added a Pringles tube which focussed the light on to the transparent lid of the tube. The lid acted as a support for the ice cube.
A few test shots with the match unlit to get the flash balance correct and then light the match and take the shot. To deepen the colour in post processing I duplicated the original image layer and set the blend mode to multiply. Sharpening took place on the upper layer only and the opacity was reduced to 80%.