Echoing what others have said, and adding what little I do know, that first picture shows too much heat.
You've got the right idea though for a quick and dirty method of annealing on the cheap. Only things I would add would be shut the lights off (as stated by others), a deep socket to hold the brass (exposes only what needs to be annealed and serves as a heat sink for the rest of the case), and a pan/bowl of water to dunk the brass into after reaching temperature.
The above isn't the most consistent method of annealing, but is about the best you can do without dumping money into dedicated annealing setups.