Fire! More fun with shutter speeds

I had the camera in the car today, on the way home from the office, when I came across the fairly common sight of a local farmer burning a junk pile near his horse corral. Inspiration struck and I pulled over and asked permission to take pictures of the fire. It didn't strike him as anything worth taking pictures of, but he humored me.

Again I set the camera to Tv, shutter speed priority, which has to be my favorite camera mode because I use it so often when feeling creative. I hadn't really explored the upper reaches of the camera's shutter speed and here I was in bright daylight-- I thought, lets see if I can make the fire stand still!

First, I started very slowly. With the apeture closed all the way to F36 (which the camera's computer simulates--the lens itself physically only goes to F3.5), the image still overexposed greatly with a shutter speed of 1/4th of a second. I had to bring the gamma down with the computer afterwards to create this image, which is kind of a creepy one if you ask me:


In the corners you can see that this shutter speed actually captured quite a bit of blue flame. Oooooooh...

I started to creep the shutter speed up. 1/15th of a second:


At 1/400th of a second the fire looked pretty realistic. The mirage effect of the large amount of heat being generated was also being captured realistically:


I continued to take photos with progressively faster shutter speeds. 1/1000, 1/2000, 1/3200, etc., until I finally reached the insane shutter speed of 1/8000th of one second. The result detail captured by the camera is pretty neat:



1/8000th of one second shutter speed. Did I mention this camera is cool?