Night and Light

Posted by CallyAnn Hamilton on Feb 27, 2013 in Blog, Photography |

This is a light sketch!  I set my shutter speed to 6 seconds with a two second timer.  I had to turn the lights on to get the camera to focus, take the shot, and then quickly turn off the lights and starts rapidly “drawing” in the air with a small LED flashlight as soon as I heard the shutter click.  I was trying to draw Navi for The Legend of Zelda so I deliberately was trying to draw wings and ended up with this. I wish I’d had a flashlight with more focused light so I didn’t have to point it right at the camera to get light trails, bu ah well.  As it was, I had to go to six neighboring apartments looking for flashlights and AAA batteries.  I used the clone stamp tool in Photoshop Elements to remove the speck of sensor dust from the image.

 

I recruited my roommate Brit to help set up and light this scene.  Most of the beautiful things in this image belong to her. It took several shots to decide where we wanted the light.  I sat by the table manning the camera, while she turned of the light and used a tiny pocket light to illuminate the scene. the greenish light on the mask was caused by Brit shining the light through the glass candy dish on the left.  I used a very subtle Gaussian blur in Photoshop elements to soften the whole image, and added a shadow vignette to add more mystery to the photo.

 

If I didn’t know any better, I’d look at this image and think it was made in Photoshop simply by dragging a white brush over a black canvas–but it’s actually a camera motion shot!  I pointed my camera at the moon, took the shot, and used my 2.5 second window of time to “draw” the shape by rapidly moving the camera.  For reasons I don’t quite understand, I had to “draw” the heart shape upside-down in order to get it to appear right-side up in the image.  It took a lot of trial and error to figure that out.  It still amazes me that the light looks so crisp!  For editing I merely cropped it in closer.