Tag Archives: painting with light

Hi Gang,  I want to share an image I shot over the weekend and discuss some of the technique use in it and the images in my previous post. “Why Are They Surfing Lake Superior?” Let’s start with that one by mentioning the photographers currently inspiring/influencing my personal work.  One is Joel Grimes (my cousin KC turned me on to him) – Joel’s work blows me away.  Another is the work of Eric Curry, who I’ve mentioned previously.  I’m beginning to play with their techniques as a fresh start to 2011 photography season.

Next I want to share a quote my friend Megan sent to me, read by her daughter from Jim Henson’s Doodle Dreams book.  “An artist gives people back a part of themselves – the stories and sounds, the feeling of what it’s like to be alive.  That’s a pretty powerful gift.”  Its just a beautiful quote I wanted to share with others.

In the Lake Superior portraits I used one light, my speedlight with a softbox on a light stand, above and right behind me.  My intention was to use a three strobe setup, but upon arriving I found out that my power converter wouldn’t handle it.  No worries, I had my alien bees battery pack as a backup.  Well, I thought it was charging the entire drive up, but it was dead.  So, #3 backup was the single speedlight I was fortunate enough to have with me.

I first shot my portraits with the light, then had John the surfer step out of the scene and shot a series of 3 images for HDR processes.  In post production I first produced the background using the Photomatix HDR engine, then I brought the frame with John back in and masked him into the image.   In both images of John I used a series of Photoshop processes, including Selective Color layers pulling back the brightness on reds and yellows, as well as a mix of gradient maps and high pass filtering to get my own gritty look.

In today’s image it was much more complicated.  Tommy, the subject, is an amazing talent.  He’s a musician, but he’s also incredibly inventive and creative.  The remote control car at his hands was built by stripping down parts from three other cars and building what he wanted.  He knows more about a race car than a NASCAR crew chief.  I wanted to photograph him in his boycave, where his work gets done.  It doesn’t stop with cars, though.  He builds extremely large, intricate Star Wars cruisers, in the background is a solar oven he built as a class project (it basically got much hotter much faster than any other), and like many young men, he digs riding his skateboard and snowboard.  While building his creations he watches “Top Gear” on TV.

The space was staged and then I brought in my strobes.  Two accent/rim lights and a key light immediately camera left.  Then the lights were removed and I shot a series of 3 images with all the room lights on, for HDR production (Photomatix Exposure Fusion engine).  After that, both Tommy and I started painting with light.  We used a fluorescent work lamp from Home Depot wrapped in blue gel for the star wars ships.  I used a spot light for the car at his hands, as well as across the floor, the stack of tires, the small helicopter lower left, etc.  Then on the lower left space ship Tommy put a flashlight down inside to get the warm glow in the control deck.   All in all, I layered together 25 frames to compose the single final image.  I’ve included a few of the layer images for reference.  The first is the HDR image, then a couple of frames painted with light.