How to take the best images of fire and firefighters at night?

I haven't shot any fire scenes since I went digital but I used to belong to a volunteer fire company. The film I used for fire scenes was Fugipress 800 and with very good results.

I would imagine that you should be able to deal with the illumination just fine as many spotlights are used during a home fire to provide area illumination as well as the illumination of the fire itself if it's involved.

Being on location doesn't mean you should enter a smoking building however in order to get good shots of the firefighters coming out or going in. The noxious (and toxic) smoke off modern furnishings and carpets is deadly which is why these guys use SCBA (Self-Contained Breathing Apparatus).

I would recommend not using any flash because of the reflective materials found on equipment, helmets and the firefighter bunker gear. Open your aperture up no less than f/8 if you need some dof (if appropriately illuminated) and using ISO 800. Any higher ISO for the D200 may get noisy but wider apertures work well too.

Some of my best shots were silhouettes of the firefighters against the building engulfed in flames. In fact, I used to sell them to the local papers and make a pretty decent living running around catching news. Now, I am a staff photojournalist and do a lot of other things. There's a lot of money to be made in what you are doing... think about the opportunities.

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The first thing you will probably have to do is accept some degree of noise with the D200. You will need to shoot at ISO 1000 or faster and you are just going to get some noise. You might look into boosting the noise reduction in your menu just for this job. I think you will end up at ISO 1000 or more so that you will be able to use decent shutter speeds that won't make everything a blurry mess. Hopefully, I am wrong and you will be able to stay down around ISO 500 or so.

Once you have found the right ISO, you can probably chimp the job. Shoot using matrix metering and see what you get. If you are shooting the whole scene with the firefighters being a small part of the image, this will probably work out. If you want to capture the face of the guys at work, consider changing to the spotmeter so you can properly expose the part that is important to you and just accept that some parts of the image are going to be borderline blown out or beyond.

You could also use the spot meter to figure out what is the hottest area in the frame (brightest) and set that to be overexposed by 2 stops, which the D200 can handle.

I don't have any fire fighting shots on-line, but this is similar in dynamic range. Read about how I metered this scene and try that.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/samfeinstein/37034274...

Good luck.

After reading your "Additional Details" I have to wonder how it is that you have owned your camera for several years and still shoot in Program Auto. Its like someone buying a car and never learning to drive.

For your night fire photography you really need to invest in the AF Nikkor 50mm f1.4 lens so you can use a lower ISO.

You really should consider taking a few photography classes and learn to actually use your camera.

this is actually very difficult. At night time, it will be nearly impossible, because the flash reflects off of the reflective pads and pretty much ruins the photos. At day you want natural light and open apertures, and fairly fast shutter speeds to avoid motion blur. As for the nightime though I honeslty cant recomend anything except maybe a tripod because the flash won't be able to do anything.

Available light if that is what you're talking about, I think I'd get a fast lens. If one is too expensive to buy just for this-I'd rent it.