Rodney Campbell's Blog

Once it got dark we grabbed our lightpainting gear and other “accessories” (shovels anyone?! :)) from the cars for a little late night work in the dark forest.

Whilst we had all wandered around separately and thus presumably got different shots during sunset – for the lightpainting session due to the nature of most of what we were doing (lots of backlighting subjects with flash for instance) we needed to have all the cameras clustered together so we didn’t get the light sources pointing directly in the frame of any of our cameras – the practical upshot of this will be that we’ll all pretty much get the same or similar shots.

It was really, REALLY dark in the forest… and the spiders… I’m thinking those beasts were putting up webs between the trees to catch bats not insects (that should give you an idea how big those suckers were)… stumbling around in the dark walking into giant spider webs with monstrosities the size of your fist… Shudder!…

From a post processing point of view I didn’t really do anything much to the night shots – they are very close to as shot with AutoWB; mostly just a touch of clarity, vibrance, shadow recovery and some sharpening, plus cloning out some small distracting lights in the distance

So onto my selection…

Note: These images (especially the wider shots) look much better when larger – so click any of the images below to see larger versions in an inline overlay slideshow gallery viewer.

A little Green Dome action by Gerry with some tree lighting (high powered torch) from the side whilst controlling the spill

Alien Light

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 17 mm, 196 sec at f/8, ISO 100

The Undertaker was predominantly lit with a number of pops (manual at 100%) of a gelled flash (SB-900) towards the camera from the other side of the subject at various angles to define them (flash zoomed out to wide) and then a couple pops down the tree lined tunnel with the flash zoomed to 200mm (at all times hiding the flash from the cameras)

The Undertaker

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 17 mm, 149 sec at f/8, ISO 100

The following utilised a similar technique with the addition of some lightpainting of the trees from the subjects position along with the use of some incredibly expensive light painting gear (a.k.a. some children’s star wand toys :))

Fireflies

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 22 mm, 224 sec at f/8, ISO 100

Finally our last lightpainting image from the night (and my favourite) was lit in a similar way

Treasured

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 22 mm, 245 sec at f/8, ISO 100

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