Fire really is quite beautiful. Difficult to capture it’s beauty though. Spent some time playing with the classic experiment of isopropanol flame fronts in a glass bottle. There’s an amazing variety of forms you can create based on a number of variables. My favorite of this set is the Flameopus (Flame Octopus)

I don’t claim to understand the science here, but I believe this results when there mixture is fuel rich (oxygen starved), calm, and cool. It forms near the neck of the vessel and as the flame front traverses the inside of the vessel the center lags behind creating these fantastic octopus-esc forms.

Once the front travels into the body of the vessel, it can take on intensely intricate patterns. Again, I believe this is extremely oxygen poor conditions, pretty much near the lower ignition limit of the mixture.

It tends to occur after a couple previous goes. The flame front travels super slowly into the bottle, and forms ripply bubbles as it moves in. I really have no idea what causes this, but it is amazing.

When oxygen starved and poorly mixed, or perhaps fuel starved as well, it forms puffs and ribbons looking like a silk curtain.

Finally, when you get the fuel to oxygen ratio perfect, the bottle explodes in under a second in a burst of blue and amber, a massive jet erupting from the top. This can be dangerous if you’re not prepared, and honestly the slower burning scenarios are much more enthralling. But the colors produced make fantastic abstract images

Photographing this is challenging. Aside from the obvious danger of burning yourself, shattering glass bottles, and setting your house on fire.. there’s also the challenge of resetting after each attempt, and trying to get the mixture right to achieve the look you’re after. Also you need a relatively fast exposure to freeze the motion, and that leaves you fighting for as much light as you can get.

My camera is especially bad in low light, and so all my images were quite a bit noisier than I’d like. These were shot with my Canon 40D, and Canon 50mm f/1.8, some with a 12mm extention ring, some without.

I also shot this in slow motion video with my Yi 4k+ Action camera. It too is pretty terrible in low light, but the video came out pretty good. I’m not much of a video editor, and even less so of a sound designer, but the video is worth a watch none-the-less.

Flame Front