I went out to shoot last night with the intention of getting a better grip on light painting. I hadn’t really done any since my last post and was itching to try it again. I wanted to get the Houston skyline (cheesy?) in the background, so I did some hunting on Google Maps first for locations that I thought might work.
After driving to the location, I found that the view was perfect; a nice, unobstructed view of the skyline – rare to come by in Houston, it seems. There was only one issue that turned out to be a real problem though. The parking lot had large overhead lighting that bathed the car in an intense white light, which I was worried would make light painting very difficult.
It did.
I spend about 15 minutes painting the nose of the car with limited success, and completely struck out on painting the sides of the car. No matter what settings I used (I mainly stuck with 10sec @ F8), the overhead light simply overpowered my little torch. I decided to take a few ambient exposures to get as much detail as I could, then packed everything up and headed home a bit defeated.
Looking at the photos in post however, I saw that they might actually have a chance. The skyline looked great, as I caught it right at the last hint of dusk and the exposures of the nose when combined added up pretty well.
I started with the original shot of the skyline and built upon it:
I added all the individual exposures that lit individual parts of the nose:
After that, it was a TON of editing to remove annoying and distracting elements like light poles and fixtures. Heavy use of the clone stamp and healing brush here!
As far as editing, I did some minor individual RGB curves adjustments, some sharpening, minor gradients and fiddled with the selective color settings a bit. I also raised the levels just a touch so that the image wasn’t TOO dark, although I kind of liked the dark look for this one.
With all that said, I now know that I need a more powerful light source or need to shoot somewhere that is close to pitch black. I did find a good spot though, and I plan on using it again soon in future attempts.
Thanks for looking!
Theo
