Fire & Flow
Something not a lot of people know about us as a family, is that Blake and Wes are aspiring flow artists, and we often take part in “fire jams” in Barrie and Toronto – and often in our own backyard – fairly regularly. Well, they do, I just take pictures.
In 2015 or so, a coworker sent the kids a set of sock poi to screw around with, but as it turned out, Blake had a good time with them, and soon he started collecting flow arts props and he & Wes attended the now defunct, Spin All The Things Workshops in Toronto for the two years it existed.
In 2017, Blake and I took a trip out to Calgary, Alberta to meet the coworker who sent us the sock poi, and all of us went to Jasper for a fun weekend of BBQing in the woods and spinning fire on the beach.
Upon returning from Jasper, Blake had bigtime caught the fire bug and we started attending the fire jams in Toronto that were loosely organized on Facebook by the Toronto flow arts community, called the New Model Circus Army. We live an hour & a half away from Toronto, so attending these jams on a Wednesday night after dark was difficult, but we did it and do it and it’s pretty fun!
In 2017, we even participated in the Winter Solstice parade through Kensington Market in Toronto, which was a spectacle to behold with a good 20+ fire performers and a giant burn at the end! IT WAS FREEZING but super fun and I got a few good shots!
Blake twisted his ankle and tore a ligament in 2017 that put him mostly out of commission until after surgery in 2018, so during that time while Blake recovered, we only attended fire jams in the city sporadically. It hasn’t really been until recently that we’ve been getting back into burns, but this time we’ve been doing them more locally, in Barrie, with a new flowmie named Marco. Here are some pictures of Blake and Marco spinning various things at Meridian Place in downtown Barrie:
I don’t know what it is about photographing fire spinning that I like so much. The biggest reason why I do it is because so many of the people who are new to flow arts don’t have photos of themselves doing it, which sucks, but more importantly, they never get to see themselves from an audiece perspective and I think performers like to see themselves that way. Also, I really just like documenting things, especially experiences. I’m not sure what it says about me, but I often have a better experience viewing live things through a lens than straight up experiencing something. I like capturing the moment. I’m not the world’s best photographer by any means, and my fire spinning photos are mediocre at best, especially compared to the professionals on Patreon who are doing the same thing but with much better equipment and an extra pair of hands. I have fun taking the pictures though, and then I get to have fun during the 6-8 hours it takes me to edit them all. Often times I’ll take over 300 photos during one fire jam and only get 1 or 2 that are worth showing anyone, sometimes I get none, and that bums me out, but I remember that I still had fun taking them so it doesn’t feel like a total loss. I do feel like I let my subject down when I don’t get a good shot, but I just remind myself that I’m not a professional and I’m not trying to be a professional and no one’s gonna blame an amateur photographer for not getting a good shot. It’s lucky I was there at all to get ANY shot!
So that’s what’s up with this funky hobby of our family’s. They provide the entertainment, I provide the documentation. Good time had by all.
