This is something that I'm going to have to try a few more times.
I have painted with light in photos before. One of my earliest attempts was in the 80s, when I was either in my late teens or early 20s and I still lived with my parents.
My bedroom in the Skyline neighbourhood of Nepean was in the finished half of our basement, and it was a pretty sweet setup. We had a rec room that had our TV and stereo, and a door to one side of the stairs led to a spacious bedroom, complete with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that set into the wall, a massive closet, and plenty of room for a double bed, a large dresser, and my desk (where I first created my fictional character, Roland Axam, and wrote my first novel, JT).
Another door in my room led to a small yet unfinished bathroom. It was tiled from floor to midway up the walls with large, clean, white tiles and had been roughed in for a toilet, sink, and shower stall. My memory recalls that the shower stall had been finished, but I may be wrong. I definitely remember that I had to use the toilet and sink that were in the powder room, across from the top of the basement stairs on the main floor.
A second door in my ensuite bathroom led back out to our rec room, but from the other side of the staircase.
Because there was no window in the unfinished bathroom, I could experiment with light painting, assured that I was in complete darkness. My experiment included my Minolta X-700 on a tripod, set on bulb with a shutter-release cable, and a match.
I struck the match and, for as long as it burned, I traced an etchy, incomplete circle around my face. The light from the flame cast a haunting, warm glow, and the slight movements that I made gave my face an eerie distortion. Shadows made it appear as though I had a thin moustache. (Eh... it was the 80s, it wouldn't have looked bad...)
It was my first attempt at this effect.
Over the years, I've done a bit of painting, using a flashlight to illuminate objects at night, but I hadn't done any drawing with a light source. The only light trails that I have focused on are those that are cast by moving cars. I have plenty of examples of those effects in The Brown Knowser. To see them, simply click light trails in my list of labels on the right-hand margin of the blog.
Last week, feeling motivated to try to create better light trails than my attempt from nearly 40 years ago (wow... it's been that long??), I gathered up my Nikon D750, my tripod, and my smartphone, and headed out to Westboro Beach, along the Ottawa River.
I arrived just as the sun was falling behind the trees across the river, on the Québec side. Ideally, I wanted as little light as possible, but I also wanted to capture some photos of the dying light, and so once I had taken those, I had more than a half an hour to wait.
I didn't want to stand around for too long, with my camera set upon its tripod, lest some bylaw officer come by and deem that I wasn't respecting the self-isolation mandate, and issue me a fine. Even though no one was with me, or near me, and I was respecting the two-metre distancing.
As soon as blue hour set in, I got to work. I set a small aperture (f/16) and set the shutter speed to 30 seconds. Locking the lens on manual focus, I set a 10-second timer and moved in front of my camera. In my hand was my smartphone with the light app, SpriteBrush Pro, covering my entire screen in a bright red.
As soon as I heard the mirror in my camera flip up, I started drawing and counting seconds.
I drew a heart. And then a second one. And then a third. One for each of my girls.
I then changed the screen app to a light spectrum, and made a rainbow.
Finally, I had the app flash individual colours, and made a random pattern.
I know: I need practice. This is something that I'm going to have to try a few more times. I need to give it more thought.
Next time, I'll really put my heart into it.
Happy Friday!
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