Before spring break my journalism professor gave us an assignment that counts towards our midterm. The assignment was to do something that you have never done before and write about it. For a little bit, I struggled to think of what I wanted to do. Especially when it started to get freezing and snow. I couldn't really think of much that I could do. Then I was talking to my friend about things we wanted to do and I brought up that I wanted to try "steel wool" photography, but I didn't know anywhere that I could do it. He then said he knew a place and so we started planning.
The things you need for steel wool photography or photos is a whisk, fine steel wool, a rope, a lighter, a tripod, and of course a camera. What you do is pull apart the wool and then put it in the whisk. After that, you're going want to tie the rope around the loop on the whisk so you can swing the whisk around. Also when you're doing this you are going to want to find a very open space because the sparks do fly far. For us, we were going to originally do it in an abandoned parking lot, but then we decided that the parking lot was a little too lit up. We then drove around for a bit trying to find places that we could do it. I really wanted to do it on concrete to limit the chances of catching anything on fire, but then we found a field covered in snow so we decided to take them there.
Now once we got to where we were going to take the pictures we ran into a little problem. First off we didn't have a tripod and so we were going to try to just make one, but then we couldn't get the tape we were going to use to make the tripod wouldn't tear in one peace. We then decided that we weren't going to give up and instead we would just hold the camera out and hope for the best. Even though the pictures were long exposed and we were holding the camera the pictures overall didn't turn out bad at all. The trees in the background of the pictures are blurry but that just adds to it.
Taking these pictures didn't really turn out the way I wanted them to because you can't see the people spinning the wool, but they still turned out really cool. By the end of it, we all had numb fingers and we decided that the next time we were going to do it when it's warmer so that we don't freeze. This is something that I have wanted to do for a while now and I am really happy that I finally got to do it even though the product wasn't what I was hoping for.
