Smoldering Charcoal ( निखारे ) --- noodles of exploding sand ( LoL )

Done away with formalities of defending long breaks, this one is a wintry surprise for me as much as others.

On a cold day, we decided to light up fire and heat up our room with smoldering charcoals.

While we were trying to brighten the charcoal, it suddenly started giving off sparks flying in the air, as we fanned it.

My 3 year old was the foremost and the most enthusiastic in doing so. With such an enthusiastic assistant, and this set up, it was no surprise that the photographer in me woke up.

I quickly ran down, brought, and and un-cased my old friend, the Sony DSC W35, a point and shoot. Turned the knob to manual, and reduced the ISO to 100, and started taking pictures.

My son, who otherwise wants to click, was so engrossed in fanning the charcoals, that he barely noticed I was using the camera.

Every time I landed a bad shot, I used to tell him, "Faster faster!", and he used to pour all his energy in making more sparks fly further, and burn the coals even brighter.

Finally, his efforts, and my patience, both paid off, and this was the shot we had. I was jolted by the picture, and decided it was definitely going on my blog.

No matter after how long.

And here it is!

The coal that we were burning consisted of two types. One that was obtained by burning wood, and the other was in form of cylinders made of powdered charcoal, and sand. This one was designed to keep it smoldering for longer times.

Since there were sand particles packed with charcoal, they used to superheat when tiny charcoal particles burned rapidly around them, and exploded. Their tiny explosions used to send out these charcoal flares, bursting in the air. More the rate of oxygen supply (faster `he' fanned), more were such tiny explosions.

There was some amount of shake in the photographs, since I did not have a tripod. One can see its traces in burning charcoal at the middle of the image, that has ~3 superposed images.



One more beautiful shot was lost to defocussing, but the next one showed such a nice burning flame, I could not resist uploading that one here, too.

I hope all viewers enjoy these photos as much as we enjoyed shooting them.

Happy new year to all the viewers.


Editing, none, other than the superposed blog label.