halloween

It is Halloween today so here's a suitable ghoulish photo that I took at the weekend. We were sitting around outside at Randy's place in the country, talking after an afternoon workshop. We got to talking about painting with light and he casually mentioned he'd just picked up a 5 million candle power spotlight. I was all over it :) This shot is a mix of the light from a sodium vapor floodlight, to the camera right, that is providing the vivid green colour and then the rest of the shot is painted in using the portable flashlight/ weapon of mass illumination. 5 million candle power is bright! I also painted myself in as a suitably ghostly presence on the porch, it almost looks like I'm wielding some sort of phantom sword too, from how I swung the light around. This was about a 30 second exposure. The one thing I try to remember when doing this sort of painting with light is not to set up the camera and then illuminate everything from that same perspective. You have to move around, get off axis to the camera - otherwise it's as exciting as putting a huge strobe right above the lens.