What should I set my Nikon D5000 to when taking pictures of fire?

I'm going to a live burn with my Dad in a couple days. I was wondering if there's any specific setting I should use.

I don't know the setting name but its the mountains. If its night time it will mess the focus up so put it on sceanary ( mountains )

Best option is auto mode and also you can use S mode or night mode which can give you stunning result!

Get a candle burning and shoot it and see what settings you like…

I dunno what 'specific settings' are there… In general if you set the camera in Manual,

then set ISO at 100 or 200
aperture at the lowest (i presume for your lens it'd be around f/5.7 something)
set shutter speed to 1/30 to 1 secs depending on how much surrounding light is there, how much blur you want, whether you have a tripod & whether you want the click to be instantaneous…

Best is learn the best settings yourself (self howework) before a burning candle…

Also for a more dramatic effect try not to use flash.

Also for a nice warm orangish picture set the 'color scale' to 'shade' from 'normal' …

Aperture Priority, same as I use for 90% of my pics. Set the aperture for the depth of field you want, half press the shutter and the camera will tell you the shutter speed it needs to set to get a good exposure.

In the scenario you suggest people sat around a fire shutter speeds will be slow as there won't be much light, watch the auto focus for the same reason you may have to use manual focus, you have two options, increase the ISO or open the aperture further (lower f number) or both, in the first you have to accept the increase in noise, in the latter the narrowing of depth of field (focusing will be more critical). Photography is usually about such compromises.

If you use Spot Metering and put the spot where you want the exposure to be correct, one of their faces around the fire for example then half press the shutter or press the Ae button to lock the exposure then re-frame their faces will be correctly exposed, but the fire will burn out, if you Spot meter on the fire the fire will be correctly exposed, but their faces will be dark, your choice.

By noting the two shutter speeds you get and going into Manual Mode and manually setting the shutter speed to somewhere in-between you'll get a compromise shot.

If your camera allows it you can take bracketed shots using the compromise setting as the 'middle' frame and under and over expose by a stop or two you can blend the three images into one with HDR software and have the correct exposure throughout the image, but that is an advanced technique which takes some practice.

Whichever way you choose shoot in Raw it just gives more options in post processing. Try to avoid burning out to white though some of that may be acceptable in the fire. You can pull more detail out of the darks (at the expense of a noisy pic), but once it's burnt out to white there's no data in those pixels for software to work on.

Use manual mode:

aperture set to high, probably around f8 or f10.experiment with f22. This will give you sharp and the fire will appear like a sunburst.compensate the shutter speed with the aperture value.experiment playing with slow shutter speed(if you have and filter) to give motion feeling into your picture by using probably around f/8 or f/5 but i guess this will cause you to overexpose the image if you don't use and filter.

ISO set to 100.experiment with ISO 200.zoom in after you take each shot to see the noise/grain level.