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So light painting has become something of a sore subject in my house. I’ve been trying to come up with some ideas for what to shoot this week and have been having a hard time. I’ve thought about tracing objects, mimicking shapes, hinting at shapes and more but nothing seemed too interesting. I’d sit up for hours thinking about ideas and hoping they would come out the way I hoped. I was scoping locations when I was riding the train to work and thinking of ways to make things work when I had free time. All of this was not that much help when I went to shoot.
So I finally decided to do some object mimicking this week, what I mean by that was to take an object and try to add some light painting to it but in a way that I was mimicking the look or feel of the object. What I decided on was a local bridge here in NY where there are lots arches in a row. I went to go shoot it one evening this week, I got there are got my camera set up on the tripod, got the cable release hooked up and the scene lined up the way I wanted it. Everything was going well at this point, but it only went downhill from here. I clicked the shutter and went jogging up the hill to start mimicking the first arch then the second then the third. I came running back to the camera let go of the cable release and waited anxiously for the preview…
It was ugly on that little 2.5in LCD screen, not that it should be perfect but it was lacking anything that I would call interesting. I had a gigantic object taking lots of the interest in the scene and some off center, off pitch, off interest light painting that was just not cutting it. I was demoralized, the shot I wanted was bad and looking at the results of even the first shot told me I would not be getting the grandiose shot I wanted but I had to try a few more things any way. I switched to a bigger light, one that would give me more reach and maybe give me more depth with the lights. It was not to be, it did give some extra depth but not enough and the area where I had to work was off center enough to make the shot seem thrown together rather then properly planned. I knew I would not get what I wanted.
I didn’t want to give up so I took a look around and thought about what else I could do, there was a path. A cobble stone path that wound up the hill with a traffic cone near by, I starting to think maybe it would work but I didn’t yet know how. So thinking about what I could do with this little path and cone and I came up with a simple idea that was not the most interesting but had some promise. I decided upon walking up and down the path with the light on to trace the outside of the path and then at the top of the path to vertically trace the cone. This came out ok but it was nothing I would want to publish other then to this site so you can see what I’m talking about.
Overall I’m starting to see that light painting is maybe not for me, I like to shoot the shot that is present. Light painting is about what you can do with the lights along with some of what you see when you get there. To some this may present a bigger challenge and a way to express something more personal, something they create. For me however it can become distracting of the real reason I came out, to photograph. I am still undecided about how I want to proceed from here for next week, so if you have ideas let me know or I may skip it and start next months project.
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