Foley Photography

I walked into the hardware store in Mechanicville. “Can you tell me where to find rubber cement?” I asked.

An employee walked with me to aisle 12 and pulled a tube off the shelf.

“Oh no,” I said, looking at the back of the tube. “This says it’s not flammable. I need something that burns big time. I’m going to light a boxer’s gloves on fire.”

(The picture above is of the guy whose gloves I’d be burning, and I think it illustrates just why I needed to get things right.)

The clerk looked at me like I was crazy.

“It’s OK,” I said. “I’m a professional.” Uh huh. “A professional photographer.”

Yeah, that made all the difference to him. He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t even want to know,” he said. He then guided me to aisle 15, where there were many more options.

I settled on something called contact cement, picked out a small paintbrush and then headed to the NY Boxing gym in Cohoes, ready to light some boxing gloves on fire.

***

“OK, guys,” I said. “I won’t be my usual, silly self while we’re doing this. I’m going to have to be a little more serious than usual.”

Everyone nodded.

“As bad as it would be to burn Shawn Miller’s hands while we’re doing this, it’d be even worse to do it because I was joking around.”

Shawn (an undefeated, professional, light heavyweight boxer who was putting his career in my hands for a few moments) looked at me like, I thought you said there was no chance my hands would get burned?

When you’re playing with fire, though, there’s always a chance …

 ***

photo by Katherine Ross Murphy

After I set up the lights (I relied heavily on rim lighting – with most of my light coming from the side or behind Shawn – to accent Shawn’s muscles and to allow the fire on the gloves to light his face a bit), Timmy White filled two buckets with water and set them right near where Shawn’s feet would be. Timmy stood in for a light test, with a glove on his hands. We applied the contact cement to the glove and flicked it with a lighter. Nothing happened. I said some not-so-nice words.

“OK, let’s try this again,” I said, racking my brain on how else I could get the gloves to burn (safely). So much of photography is problem-solving without letting anybody see you sweat.

I applied more of the goo, a little more liberally this time. The flame came immediately. It was high, but under control. It burned for about 20 seconds before dying out. And it didn’t even come close to going through the gloves. Really, it was mostly just the contact cement that burned.

“Let’s do this,” I said.

I showed Shawn how I wanted him to stand. I advised him to keep his hands wider than he normally would so that the flames wouldn’t be right in front of his face. Obviously, I told him to keep his hands away from his face and to keep his eyes focused on me so that I could go right to work. Then I asked Timmy to light him up.

Timmy flicked both gloves quickly and backed away. Katherine Ross Murphy, a friend and fellow photographer, photographed the scene:

photo by Katherine Ross Murphy

photo by Katherine Ross Murphy

Shawn looked at me, menacingly, and I snapped about five frames before the flames died down. We didn’t even need to use the buckets of water. Only the surface of the gloves burned.

I adjusted my lighting (Canon 550EX flashes), darkening the mood a little bit, and we lit the same gloves again. Another five frames and we were done. The whole shoot took less than 30 minutes from start to finish.

And no one got burned! The final picture, which immediately becomes one of my all-time favorites, is below.

Thanks to Timmy for assisting, and thanks to Katherine for the photos showing the setup.