Light Painting

A light painting technique was demonstrated on a rock wall at the opening of a small cave on the Katy Trail East of Rocheport, Mo. on April 27, 2015. This site was chosen because of its remoteness and lack of ambient light.

This was my first attempt at light painting. I understand the concept well and have always wanted to try it but never got around to trying it. I think it was beneficial to try the technique in a group setting first rather than on my own. It takes a lot of work and time to get it right, and I was glad that there were others there that were working to achieve the same goal.

            My job for this shoot was to light the inside of the room. It was the only flash that was going to fired multiple times and I had to change the power from quarter power for the shot on the wall and through the door, to eighth power for the shot through left and right edges of the room. All of the other flashes were fired only once. Another reason that I was inside was because some of the other people were afraid to go into the room at night. There was a lot of moonlight, but they way that the cliff was over the room, there was no light going into it.

            We went about this a different way than the way at Rock Bridge. We set the camera exposure to 30 seconds and did a test shot to see how much light pollution was coming from the moon. There was very little, so little that on the LCD it didn’t show any at all. So we left it at 30 seconds and then added one light at a time. I am a big fan of adding light as I go along, rather than having a bunch of light and trying to figure out which one is doing what. This was all my idea for not using an open shutter. I understand that if I were doing this alone I would have to use open shutter because I wouldn’t be able to move around and fire each of the flashes and use the flashlight in only 30 seconds. Another reason that I wanted to stay with 30 seconds was so that we had a defined time every time. Since part of the shoot had light painting with a flashlight we wanted to make sure that the exposure time was fixed so that was one variable that we could count on being constant. The flashlight painting varied from five to seven seconds.

             I think the shoot came out well. I stayed in the room for much of the shoot, and would check the camera every third or fourth shot. I relied heavily on my team to articulate what was working and what wasn’t with the shoot. There are some things I would have done differently with the ratios but nothing that is worth mentioning. I would happily work with this group again.