Well, after nearly a year or so of neglecting any type of light painting, I got the itch to dust off the old LED torch and try again last night. It has been quite a while since my last lightpainting posts, (One and Two) and I wanted to try and resharpen my sills with it. It is much more labor intensive than regular flash photography, but the results, when done correctly, can be pretty great. Admittedly very rusty on the subject, I was a bit apprehensive about the results!
My friend Robert of Dabert Photography came along to help out. We used a location east of Downtown Houston that a friend had told me about before. With a great skyline view featuring Minute Maid Park off to the left and the new Harris County Courthouse building in the center, it was a great find in an otherwise pretty dismal location. With ominous clouds approaching, we quickly set up our two RSXs for a single lightpainting shot.
It takes a little while to get back into the mindset of lightpainting, where you have to visualize your “strokes” as you go along “painting” each individual panel and surface of the cars. It’s always best to find the angle that makes the best (hardest) contrast against the creases and folds in the sheetmetal. This gives the super sharp look that makes light painting so appealing. It took about 15 exposures per vehicle to adequately cover both with light. From there, I took an ambient shot of the city with proper white balance, which was thrown off by the very yellow tinge of the overhead streetlights.
In post, it was a similar process to the lightpainting technique. I took the various layers and masked them all together in one large composite. I tweaked the curves, color balance and hue of the image to make it a little more true to life. You can see the final image below. I also put together a video of my editing of the image in a YouTube video, which is posted below the image.
I definitely need some more practice with light painting! I’ve made it a goal to get out and shoot more for fun this year, and I will try my best to stick with it!
