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With a quieter time in winter, I turn my creative attentions to developing some new work with light painting. Last year's work with dried flower arrangements (for exhibition) was well received and I thought to extend on that. Personally, light painting is either one of those styles you love or you don't. I think my natural tendency is to be more subtle but here I've embraced the idea of something different.
I've been playing with a lot of different and varying light sources. Mainly, I found my preference is for warm tungsten bulbs, and in the current age of LED these are near impossible to find. However, a random find in a 'Cheap as Chips' store they had $4.00 torches with old tungsten bulbs. What a find (purchased 4 to go in my kit)! My reasoning for warm bulbs is none other than personal preference. Whilst I tried warming gels, softer lighting, smaller bulbs etc., the torches that gave me the outcomes I wanted involved tungsten. However - saying that, my recent recent work was with completely different hand-made LED lighting tools.
With a familiar style (and extending from my more familiar work last year), I used similar concepts and included movement into the finals. Light painting is tricky, you're working with either too much, too little light, working in the dark and with long exposures. It's one of those techniques you do it, do it again, and do it again and again and again!!!
Despite adversity, here are the two works I created along a similar theme. Additional to basic light painting I had been exploring the work of Kathleen Clemens recently studying her 'painterly' photography techniques.
Moving away from still life and painterly effects, my mum gave me some peacock features thinking one day I'd shoot them in a fun creative way. So I used a white (yes I hear the contradiction) LED torch and long exposures to create what looks like multiple exposures. The trick was to move the feathers and then reposition them in a new spot... again - shoot - shoot again - again - again (repeat until you feel like your going backwards!). Then voila - one of those 'grapples-in-the-dark' actually work out (and then a bit of Lr magic). Here are the outcomes. My favourite is the first - this included some optic fiber work (for good measure)!
.... As evolution would have it, I moved on to work some self-portrait work with optic fiber. This was a random find in a cheap store and after a bit of crafty re-working, I created some kind of bizarre optic torchy thing. They say, necessity is the motherhood of invention. I guess portrait work always resonates with me more than still life.
Self portraits no.1 & no.2.
And now I realise, winter is ongoing and there is more opportunity to perfect these techniques. Maybe a body of work could result from the portrait work? More to come........