Man of steel wool makes sparks fly

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/08/2015 (3753 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

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Winnipegger Kyle Schappert is gaining international attention for his eye-catching steel wool photography. Not bad for someone who first started experimenting with the technique, which involves spinning a burning piece of steel wool to create a shower of sparks, only a year ago.

“I got wind of steel wool photography from a couple of long-exposure feature pages on Instagram,” he says. “My first steel wool shoot was on July 24 of last year. We captured some great photos spinning in the St. Boniface industrial area and I was immediately hooked.

“One of the photos was featured by @longexpoelite on Instagram and the gratification that came from seeing my photo reposted and having more people follow my feed pumped my tires enough to keep swinging!”

He sought other online sources for more information on technique and inspiration. They include @steelwool_photography, @ig_steelwool, @steelwool_daily and @windycityspinners.

“This is where I found most of my inspiration and found the competitive aspect of coming up with new ideas of where to shoot and how to shoot.”

Schappert’s work was featured in Maclean’s magazine earlier this year. Since then, people traveling through Winnipeg look him up in the hopes of collaborating.

He currently posts all his work on Facebook, but hopes to set up his own website in the future. He also started an Instagram feature page — @pegcityspinners — where he curates images by people using the same steel-wool style from all over the world.

Steel wool spinning in Schappert’s words:

• I get the “0000” grade steel wool from Canadian Tire or Rona.
• I use a dog leash attached to a whisk to spin the steel wool.
• I’ve spun pretty much everywhere besides indoors in a highly public area. I always make sure I’m not spinning where there are too many risks to start fires, such as plastic or dry leaves. Sometimes I do shoot/spin in risky locations, but I have a couple of people around to help me out if anything were to go wrong.
• I have used gloves in the past to prevent blisters from spinning.
• I use a tripod and manual setting on a DSLR camera to capture the images, with a 10- to 30-second exposure.
• I use a timer on my camera unless I’m doing a very wide shot. Then I have a friend helping man the equipment. Also, using a timer is fun because it gives you a specific amount of time to set up — so if I need to climb a railcar, etc., it gets pretty exciting!
• I pack the wool into the whisk prior to pressing the timer. I set it up for two shots so I keep extra wool on me to reload and away we go! The sparks never fly the same way twice!
• I try to light the wool one to two seconds before the exposure begins to give me time to get into the spinning pose. This allows for more control of the smaller details (how I want the flying sparks to look) of the image.

Other things to consider: