Just a Light Painting Photography?

No there is so much more than just a Light Painting shot of an elephant.

There is more than just Light Painting an Elephant. My passion for Elephants started already a long time ago. Here on Hive I am known pretty much only for Light Painting Photogrpahy, but there is more. One ting at the time. Lets show what most expect here first. So then I want to show the most recent two photos of an elephants. Of course these are then Light Paintings. Single Exposures without any tricks in Photoshop. Just like always.

Both shots were taken during a visit to the Cristalica Glasshouse in Döbern which is about 1.5h south of Berlin and is very visible from the street. It's a huge glass pyramid not to miss. You saw a few of these shots here on my blog.

But there is more than just posting two Light Paintings of a little Elephant sculpture. In my past, I just came across elephants again and again. Meeting elephants close up makes a huge difference that I did not expect and most of us out there cant comprehend neither.

My first elephant?

This is the courtyard of the house that I grew up. Not the fanciest area but we had an elephant with a slide trunk. All the kids in the neighborhood loved it. Me too.

Years later I started to get into acoustics and worked for 18 years with the Acoustic Camera. During my time with the Acoustic Camera, I researched many different topics so interesting there worth an extra book. One of the most interesting research I was involved with, was the work on Elephant communication in collaboration with the University of Vienna.

The next photo I took during a late-night session in Nepal. The video shows you more about the work.

This topic brought me into working with some Elephant researchers from Austria and led to several research expeditions to Botswana, Nepal, and South Africa.

A photograph of sound. The Acoustic Camera visualizes where the sound comes from in a color table. Just like Heat maps you know from Thermal Cameras, Red shows where the sound comes from.

The results led to numerous papers in the field of BioAcoustics investigating the communication mechanisms around African and Asian elephants. Often the question is how do elephants produce specific sounds. Super interesting as a topic but maybe not the right place here to dive into.

This is my research colleague Angela S. Stoeger with the test setup from the University of Vienna.
The first paper we published you'll find following this link on PlosOne.
Thank you Angela and Veronika for letting me take part in your important work and see the world of elephants so close. Elephants are amazing creatures and we as humans once again did not yet learn to listen properly.

Trust me I could talk about this for hours and hours. Here may not be the right place to talk about the entire story at length but you get to a get a glance that there is more to it ;-)

The results of the latest research will come out in the following months. Here I can not share any results from these measurement campaigns. If you are interested I share with you the results once published in proper paper form.

I hope it was informative and maybe also inspirational. If you have more questions please do not hesitate. I am happy to share my knowledge.

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Gunnar Heilmann Photogrpahy

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