All fired up

A human touch

Nothing says Christmas quite like a flaming plum pudding, and having a person carrying this most traditional of desserts, complete with seasonal jumper, lends the shot a homely feel. After popping the pud into the microwave for a couple of minutes and applying a generous dousing of pre-warmed brandy, we lit the pudding. The flames don’t last long, so we’d need to be quick! It needs to be dark for the flames to show up, so we dimmed the lights and whacked up our ISO to enable a 1/50 sec shutter speed and shot handheld, so that we could quickly frame up our scene, trusting the Vibration Reduction system to counter camera shake and instructing our model to hold still. We focused on the top of the pudding and set High-speed Continuous mode, then rattled off a sequence of shots, so we could select the one that had the flames in the most attractive position.