Behind the scenes of the Trip to Görlitz.
A night to Light Paint in the Library
As the easternmost city of Germany, Görlitz is the place to be if you’re after a generous dose of culture. Together with friends from Saxony, I spent a night in the museum/library. Thanx to the great Organization of Danilo Strauss and company of good friend Felix Leda from Ferpixelt, Feli, and Natalia I got to spent a wonderful time light painting in Görlitz.
Görlitz has a rich architectural heritage on display. (there is to explore lots of historic remains of Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassical, Art Nouveau times).
The Barockhaus is the most significant Baroque building in the region. It hosts the artistically formed "Oberlausitzische Bibliothek der Wissenschaften" Engl: Upper Lusatian Library of Sciences and its collection mostly dedicated to science.
Founded by Karl Gottlob Anton in celebration of the enlightenment, it contains around 140.000 volumes, manuscripts, and handwritten books as old as from the 11th, documenting the history and culture, art, nature, economy, and society of the region.
Whether you are a book worm or not, this architectural Gem inspired my curious sense of engineering in wonder. We had access to the wooden vaulted shelves filled with handwritten, copper printer medieval science books.
The one book came to my attention, titled "Upper- Lower Lusatia Historic, Politics and other oddities" with the illustration of a laying man holding a string of fish. His relaxed pose and framing was the ideal detail to be part of that complex technique: lens swapping.
The book was written by Samuel Grosser and published first on the 31st of December 1714. Want to have a read? Go to: https://play.google.com/store/books/d...
The technique involved exchanging lenses and swapping tripods during a single exposure. The photograph was shot with a CANON EF 70-200mm F2.8 lenses set to F32. The challenge there is that as precious as the book was, it was sitting behind a glass window for protection. Meticulously and with several attempts to avoid mirroring reflections, I was able to illuminate exclusively the man from the complex illustration made in the 17th century.
The next step was:
the Camera was detached from the Canon lens and carefully attached to a LAOWA Zero D 12mm lens. With a hat on the lens fully covered, the camera was moved to the other room and mounted on the second tripod.
The entire procedure was practiced about four or five times until it worked. In the final round, the entire choreography took 173 seconds.
This was the most interesting photograph from that evening from its complexity and symbolism. We later discovered the illustration of the man was a copper engraving, the earliest form of printmaking. My process for "stamping him into my lenses holds parallelism across over 400 years!"
Many thanks to the Die Freunden der Görlitzer Samlungen e.V., who trusted on us to photograph their cultural heritage, run through their corridors of history in the dark. Special thanks for staying up so late on such a cold evening.
My shout out to Danilo Strauss, for holding and sharing access to Görlitz precious gems as well as to Feli our model, and Felix Leda for a great collaboration here.
Thank you Natalia for filming and helping with the edit.
Thank you all.
