Fire Spinning

My nephew spins fire.  Or rather, he practices fire poi, which involves spinning metal balls filled with kerosene and suspended on metal chains.  He got introduced to fire poi in high school and continues to practice even while studying in Japan.

While visiting us over the holidays, Rusty gave us two command performances: in front of our house and in front of the office.  Thank goodness no neighbors called the police on us.  Rusty is very careful, he has hundreds of hours of practice behind him, he wears a kevlar mask and gloves, and he performs a good distance away from folks.  He is also very careful with how he disposes of any leftover fuel.

Let me tell you, fire poi is unbelievable.  It's mesmerizing, it's graceful, it's frightening, and it's beautiful to watch.  When Rusty was performing in front of our house, some neighbors came out to watch.  During the performance in front of our office, the security guard joined us and seemed to really enjoy the fire spinning.  Here are some pictures and a video.

The photos were taken with my Sony cybershot camera, on night mode, no flash, 3 second exposure.

This photo makes me think of musical notes.

This video was taken with my Sony cybershot in video mode.  I have HD footage but the file is huge and I'm still new to converting HD video to different formats.