These are some of my favourites from my final project for Light and Studio. This assignment was fairly open, and we were encouraged to experiment with lighting techniques we learned throughout the semester.

Some are digital, some are film. Try and guess which is which!

Last Thursday was great. Had a class barbecue -thought it would be terrible with the rain at first, but after a while it just got better and better, and I started to have fun. It kind of crept on me. I just didn’t expect to, I was super pissed off. Anyway, we had glowsticks. Amazing fun. We danced with them and took some really cool photos.

I always like to do things like this, playing with cameras and lights when I’m bored. Turns out there’s a whole art movement of ‘light painting’, and its amazing what you can make. Check out these:

Nice right? But ours are nicer. Haha! Then on Friday was Gabriel’s ‘housewarming’. Haha. I need a dog or a cat. A grey one. And I’d care for it so much better than Gabriel! Wadee and I fed them, and they were so hungry! I think they haven’t been fed for days.

You know, I get an average of around 20 viewers (of this blog) daily. Not much, I know, but why do I get like zero comments? Comment people.

I really like this song. Hm. WordPress doesn’t seem to be able to just upload the music itself. Annoying.

Wow I wish I had these shoes. They’re really cool. And Swedish I think. (I just ate Swedish meatballs, haha.) Adios!

I am rushing out the door right now,but I must stop for a moment and report on this very cool discovery related to Man Ray and light painting, or as he called it “space writing”.  I was forwarded this information by the Man Ray Trust.

Man Ray is the first light painter.  His “space writing” images are the very first recorded light painting images that I can find.  You can see his 3 “space writing” images here.

Well, in a recent article in The Smithsonian Magazine there is news about an interesting new discovery in his “space writing” images.  Quoting from the article, “…Ellen Carey, a photographer whose working method is similar to Man Ray’s, has discovered something that has been hidden in plain sight in Space Writings for the past 74 years: the artist’s signature, signed with the penlight amid the swirls and loops.”

This is a link to the article. Be sure to check out the interactive demonstration at the right hand side of the page to see his signature outlined clearly.

I’ll have more about “space writing” later as I work to include these images, and analysis of them, into Luminary.

It’s been a while since I have posted a video, so I thought I would give you a double-header.  This is the first of two videos that show how I made an image called Nightmare.  This video is part 1 which takes you behind the scenes when we did the shoot.  It was a lot of fun, there was a group of about 8 of us and I think everyone really enjoyed the location and the shoot.  When you are shooting with a good group it really makes photography fun.  We were also lucky enough to have a gorgeous and talented model (thank you Mandy) who modeled for us.

This shot is something different for me in a few different ways.

1. It combines off-camera flash with light painting.  I don’t normally do much off-camera flash, but I’m keen to start doing more after Oat and Nelson’s wonderful off-camera flash workshop.
2. It is a shot of a person… I normally have a bit of a mantra of not shooting anything that talks or shits.  Hence the fascination with seascapes, landscapes and urban shots.  In this case I do feature the beautiful Mandy.
3. This shot was totally pre-visualised for about 3 months, and I have set out to create it.  I planned everything about the shot from the pools of light to the type of clothes that Mandy had on.  I wanted to see if I had the technique to accurately re-create my vision…. and I have to say I was very happy with the results.

What is this shot about?

Nightmare is about a chick who has been out for a wild night of partying finding herself in the wee hours of the morning in one god-awful freaky place.  Her clothes are in disarray, her makup is smudged over face and I wanted to create a response in the viewer of “what the hell happened to her…. what is she doing in this freaky place”?

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the video…. I will try to post part II tomorrow which will show the post processing including some pretty cool techniques.

This video was produced in High Definition, so I’m not going to embed it inline with the blog but send you over to Vimeo where you can enjoy it in all it’s HD splendor.

Brent

Bem o apagão no Brasil aconteceu na última terça-feria (10-11-2009), porém meu sábado foi de noite escura, sem qualquer vestígio de energia elétrica.
Estava em Juatuba no último sábado, por volta das 19:30 a energia da cidade, isso mesmo da cidade acabou. De imediato peguei o telefone e disquei 116, fui atendido rapidamente e a atendente pediu que fizesse alguns procedimentos básicos, como informar número de cliente, confirmar endereço e algumas coisas de praxe. O que me surpreendeu foi ela pedir para me dirigir ao padrão de energia para ligar e desligar a chave do disjuntor três vezes mesmo após relatar que todo o bairro estava escuro, sem qualquer sinal de lâmpada acesa.
Após alguns minutos e retomo a ligação dizendo que tinha feito o teste:
Eu: Pronto já fiz.
Atendente: E o que aconteceu?
Eu: Nada. Continua tudo apagado e como eu já tinha relatado o bairro inteiro está escuro.
Atendente: Apenas como procedimento senhor, preciso informar que caso nossa equipe desloque até seu endereço e verifique o problema sendo no disjuntor ou na rede interna da sua residência a Cemig cobrará uma taxa na sua próxima conta no valor de R$5,00.

Nessa hora deu vontade de soltar uma gargalhada. Como pode uma pessoa trabalhar tão “robotizada”, “mecanizada” dessa forma?

Porém o bom disso tudo é que sem energia elétrica não restou muita coisa pra fazer a não ser fotografar. Isso mesmo, ou pelo menos treinar uma velha técnica conhecida de muitos chamada Light Painting. Abaixo segue o resultado dos testes que não foi lá grandes coisas.

Primeira tentativa

Segunda tentativa

Terceira tentativa

Quarta tentativa, logo após minha bateria ficou sem carga e como a energia só voltaria tarde da noite (voltou por volta das 00:00) desmontei tudo e fui dormir.

Just finished this book about the Ghost Towns out west.  When I picked it up intrigued by the subject matter.  The old western towns that were abandoned as quickly as they were erected, but what I found when I got into the book was the photography was outstanding.  The photographer Berthoid Steinhilber is truly an artist.  He is a great photographer, and a great painter.  I am not talking about a brush and a canvas.  He uses a spotlight from a ship to paint in the light of these photographs.  It gives them this feeling that someone could still be living in them, even though the building are about to fall down.  I was very impressed, so you need to check out this book.  It will make you want to grab your camera and head out on an adventure.

'light paint'

Light Painting is pretty hard… i made a little processing sketch to assist me in the process of light painting… it shows in almost real time the image that is being drawn and it uses Arduino to connect with the camera… more about this coming soon.

Velocidad luz
2do. Lugar animasivo 2009

peinture lumière par georg liebergesell

It’s up!

Read my interview with photographer Steve Carty and visual artist Jon Todd on the Hermann & Audrey blog about their collaboration. This session was so inspiring that they’ll be more in the near future. Sit tight and wait to the visual beauty about to emerge from these two artists.

Well welcome to Monday folks. And since it’s been awhile since I’ve thrown the best of the best links around – let’s do that for an introduction to the week.

§ It’s been around the Internet for a few days now, but the interesting site from last week to me is the new dpBestflow web site. The idea behind dpBestflow is an effort from the American Society of Media Photographers and the Library of Congress to come up with a “best practices” for digital photography. John Harrington has a nice summary written up on his blog – one of many from the last few days. Here’s a quote from Harrington on how useful something like this can be – to any of us:

“I’ll… tell you that you that everything you ever wanted to know about every aspect of workflow, in simple and easy to understand visuals and videos, is ALL THERE. FOR FREE.”

Umm, yeah – you had me at workflow – but then it got better. And if you’re a lazy bum (unlike me – I was only kidding last week), you should at least read this Quick Reference.

§ We’ve been starting to toy with the idea of light painting in the No-Light/Low-Light class at the Peoria Art Guild. Take a look at this page of lightpainters if you want to be inspired by this craft – it looks easy – and yet – it’s not (hat tip to Joy Miller).

§ We sometimes walk around here talking about Photoshop, Lightroom, Bridge, and Elements like everyone already knows. If you’re interested in starting from scratch as a photographer in the world of post-processing, I can not suggest a better place to start then Lightroom from Adobe. It – to me – is the best of everything else specifically for Photography. Check out this Digital Photography School article on “Lightroom: What is it and When you Should Consider it?” And if you get far enough, just like we did with Scott Bourne and Rob Sylvan a few weeks ago, we now present Scott Kelby’s “10 Things I Would Tell New Lightroom Users.” It’s a nice way to cut through the chatter.

§ Nevertheless, if you’re comfortable in all things Photoshop/Lightroom/etc., then check out this advanced cloning technique in Photoshop. Cloning is one of the easiest tools to use in Photoshop – and one of the easiest things to do badly. Anytime I can improve my technique with this valuable tool – I jump at it. Nicole Young shows you how over on Photo Focus.

§ To my friends with Nikon’s massive 14-24 f/2.8 lens, who wish they could put some split ND grad filters on the front, I say - problem solved – courtesy of the Brits.

§ Feeling a bit amateur. Well stop it. Thanks to Mr. Vision – David duChemin.

§ And another slightly more advanced topic: light meters. Want the 411 on all the ways an EXTERNAL light meter can help you. Check out the wisdom dispensed from the gang at Lighting Essentials. A light meter outside of the camera is the next step up if you want to really, really nail your exposures.

§ And I’ll leave you with this crossover gem. And by crossover I mean combining a few of the things I’m coming to love all in one place. Check out these timelapse videos of all things nature and send yourself over to Vimeo after the fact to see the behind-the-scenes work on how it was done.

Tenía una espinita clavada con esto del “light painting” desde hace tiempo, y hoy al fín la he sacado y sin hacerme daño!!

Me he llevado de colaborador a Roberto (@Cortador), hemos echado las reflex y el trípode a la mochila y esta vez las hemos acompañado de una luz de led en color azul que compré hace unos días (en realidad con otro propósito, pero hay que aprovechar bien las cosas).

El lugar elegido ha sido el “parque grande” ya que tiene zonas de mucha oscuridad perfectas para hacer dibujos con trazos infinitos. Estos han sido los resultados (la próxima vez dibujaremos mejor jejejej):

Somewhere between where we’ve been and where we’re going we have a choice. We have a choice to become stronger; stronger than our pasts, stronger than what people think, stronger than what we think. How true it is, that when we are weak, we are strong. We have a choice today, we can be stronger than we were the day before. But our strength will never be enough. It is only in a mighty Creators hands that we can find strength, true strength; and then, and only then, can we truly become… stronger.

Well this is the second year that I have stayed away from Sculpture By the Sea during pre-dawn or daylight hours…. It’s like Pitt Street for Photographers… has been for a few years now.

But at night…  all the people go except for the occasional couple that stroll by with torches.  You have plenty of space and time to just experiment and play.

Here’s a couple of shots from this years exhibition.

This was probably my favorite shot from the two nights that I went out shooting.  Funnily enough it was the last shot of the night.  I’d seen this face when I was browsing through some of the other photos of the exhibition, and while none of the other images of the sculpture grabbed me, the face itself did.  I figured it would have possibilities before I even saw it, so it was on my “must shoot” list for the night.  It really helps to do your research, otherwise I could have easily missed it.  As it was I had to ask the security guards where to find this sculpture.

OK, a bit of info on how I made this shot.  The first thing is that I am previsualising my light paintings much better these days.  When I looked at the sculpture here’s what I was thinking….

• Cool face…  I could some cool things with highlights and shadows on the face
• Love the horizon and water in the background
• The bushes create a nice transition against the sea… want to emphasize them
• The stars and the clouds are very cool… I want to get lots of stars and no star trails and try to get some of the little puffs of clouds to blur in the sky.
• I liked the way the sculpture cut above the horizon and kind of made a nice transition between the land and the heavens… I wanted to emphasise this as well.
• As I was looking at this I thought it would look cool if the face was kind of emerging out of a blue-light fog.

So that was what was going on in my head… so here’s how I set about executing it.

(You might want to click on the image above to see it full size)

I started off with my heaven shot… my background.  Set my camera to ISO3200 and shot 30sec @ f5.6  This gives me heaps of bright stars due to the high ISO and no star trails due to the 30sec exposure (lucky I’m shooting with a Nikon)… Canon would probably give me a shit-load of noise…. OK… couldn’t resist that jibe… seriously though, the D700 is awesome at this high an ISO.

Then I started my first white light run on the face with the fluoro light.  Aftger that I saw clouds coming over, so I redid my heaven shot.  The the next two images were more light painting on the face from different angles.  Once I felt I had the face captured from the right angles, I light painted the bushes in the background.  I then did two frames of the face in blue light (using cold cathodes).  This was to give me some blue light on the face from the blue fog.  I then thought that perhaps I might light up the face red to see what it looked like in contrasting colours emerging from the blue fog…. however when I previewed it in Photoshop I didn’t really like it, so I didn’t use the red images.

The final image is of the blue “fog” that I created with Electro-luminesent wire.  This stuff is wicked.  It creates cool water/fog effects.

Then I just started working the blending in Photoshop. The trickiest part was making an accurate mask around the sculpture that was sticking up in the sky.  I used a contrast mask for that (see my cool shit tutorial series for video on how to do that).

Here’s a couple of my other shots from Sculpture By the Sea.

I loved the look of this horse from the moment I saw it.  It had “light painting” written all over it.  I loved the way it overlooked the water.  I used contrasting colours to really try to highlight the insides of the horse.

This last shot was from my first night’s shoot.  I just wanted to do something a bit abstract and different with it, so I threw the sky into almost total blackness and focused on abstracting the sculpture and the surroundings.

For those that want to learn this type of photography see my Light Painting Workshop Page.  Still a few spots left for the Nov 09 workshop.

Brent

This is another project for my Studio Lighting class. For the assignment, we had to experiment with alternative light sources by light painting. I’d never done this before, I played around with it on my digital SLR, but ultimately shot the assignment on film. Doing this requires complete darkness, as the only light came from a small flashlight. I tried to illuminate different parts of the vase/flowers for different shots. That’s why in one image the vase is well lit, while the flowers are in the dark.

Most of these were shot between 10-20 seconds, at F22. I used a small LED flashlight. I tried using a different flashlight, with a more incandescent light, but it made the subject appear super yellow. The colder colour temperature of the LED flashlight worked a lot better, especially with the navy background and blue and white vase.

Aprenda light painting, leia abaixo. Foto: Fábio Machado

Esta semana vai rolar a Conferência de Comunicação da Juventude.

Entre as oficinas oferecidas está a de Light Painting.
Confira:

Light Painting –
Técnica fotográfica Light Painting (Pintando com luz). Fotografias com longa exposição e deslocamentos da luz para desenhos na imagem. Manipulação da imagem sem uso de programas pós-produção.
Ministrada por: Izaias Buzon, Lia Carreira, Taciana Botelho, Gustavo Louzada

http://confecomjuventude.wordpress.com/

Ah minha época de Street Fighter. Foto: Fábio Machado

Quando levamos a fotografia muito a sério, esquecemos que ela também deve ser diversão. Eu cometo esse erro esporadicamente, deixando de levar uma câmera pras situações de divertimento em família, com amigos etc.

Neste fim de semana decidi que faria muitas fotos, essencialmente por diversão. Em viagem ao interior aproveitei a ocasião para fotografar com light painting. A técnica consiste em desenhar com luz deixando a câmera em longas exposições, de 15 a 30 segundos no meu caso.

Utilizei uma lanterna, um óculos de brinquedo com luz azul e um par de chifres iluminados. Qualquer um destes acessórios pode ser adquirido por menos de R$10.

Dicas:

• Use um tripé ou apoio que deixe a câmera fixa, sem trepidações.
• Use o modo de disparo com timer, pelo mesmo motivo acima.
• Feche bem o diafragma da lente, para obter profundidade de campo.
• Se quiser que uma pessoa apareça nitidamente na foto jogue a luz da lanterna sobre ela por alguns segundos ou dispare um flash  bem direcionado nos últimos segundos.
• No caso de iluminar a pessoa com lanterna, é preciso que ela fique estática.
• Coloque a velocidade de exposição com pelo menos  10 segundos, para que tenha tempo de ‘desenhar’.

Abaixo um vídeo tutorial bem interessante, encontrei no You Tube.

Até breve,

Fábio Machado

fabiomachadocardoso@gmail.com

Ciao a tutti,
il light painting é una tecnica fotografica che permette di disegnare dei veri e propri “dipinti” con il semplice uso di varie lucine. E’ da poco che ho scoperto questa fantastica tecnica e non vedo l’ora di metterla bene in pratica. Per ora mi limito a fare molte prove..quindi al momento sono in fase di studio..spero presto di realizzare qualcosa di piu’ di un semplice ciao o disegnini vari.
Per sperimentare uso:
-Nikon d60;
-torcia;
-buio (ovviamente);
-camera su manuale con tempo di esposizione bulb;
-tanta pazienza ;D

painting with light – saw a guy doing this at school and thought I would give it a try. Today was the first photo critique at school in design lab. I got a good response with my “lines” pic – good composition, point of view, and printing. whew!

Two face, 2009.

This has to be one of my favourite images I have created. I started off by moving one light source at a rapid speed, while my assistant (Alex) switched on the first studio light for only an instant. While I gathered myself for the second pose, Alex then repeated the process, by prompting the final studio light flash to pick up the second pose.