It's a curious thing to completely forget about a photoshoot and then to find the files again on a hard drive and wonder what in the heck was I thinking not posting these images! That's exactly what happened with this night out in the dark with Tom Hill who'd made a special trip down from the North East of England to meet up for a spot of lightpainting!
We arranged to meet at a local fast food establishment and headed to this abandoned factory in Matlock, Derbyshire. The access to the site is very easy and only a short walk with no fences to climb with heavy gear. I gave Tom the "ten cent tour" around the site and we set about waving lights in the dark.
Tom's speciality
Tom is known in the lightpainting community as a waver of lights. There are many sub genres of lightpainting and this is very much Tom's style. He carefully considers what shapes he's going to throw in advance and uses fluorescent markers on the ground to mark out his reference points. This is very much Tom's work which also explains why even though I shot it with my camera, I never posted it before now.
My speciality
Rather than this be a post all about Tom's work, I decided as I wrote this post to include images of mine made with the assistance of Tom.
For this one, I rotated the camera four ways leaving a dark, unexposed space in the middle of the frame. I then swapped lenses and tripod with the camera still running in the dark. Tom stood in the middle of frame and briefly lit himself up with my LED Lenser X21r2 beast.
This is very much my style rather than Tom's and on a collaboration we both learn something out of our own box of techniques.
Electric leaves
This is another of Tom's light waving stuff where I've added in the lighting at the rear of the frame. I may have overdone the red!
Industrial Strength Zoom Pull
Another shot I rejected from the collaboration with Tom where I zoom pulled with a continuous light source behind Tom.
Mixing it up
Tom suffers OCD like the rest of us and here Tom was waving lights for England in the Olympics so I changed the colours in the rear a little:
About me:
I usually specialise in shooting lightpainting images but occasionally dabble in urbex and artistic model photography. I'm always on the lookout for someone to collaborate with; please don't hesitate to get in touch if you'd like to create art.
Social Media
https://www.facebook.com/fastchrisuk
https://www.flickr.com/photos/fastchris/
Lightpainting is a photographic technique in which exposures are made by moving a hand-held light source while taking a long exposure photograph, either to illuminate a subject or to shine a point of light directly at the camera, or by moving the camera itself during exposure. Nothing is added or removed in post processing.
If you would like to see more lightpainting please give the Lightpainters United Community a follow and you will be introduced into the illuminating world of light painting!
If you want to see more examples of lightpainting, feel free to check out these guys:
Mafu Fuma | Oddballgraphics | FadetoBlack | DAWN | Mart Barras | Stefan Stepke | Nikolay Trebukhin | Lee Todd | Stabeu Light | Maxime Pateau | Stephen Sampson | lightandlense | Neil Rushby | L.A.C.E.
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