Rodney Campbell's Blog

Joined good friends Gerry and Suren for a very late (got home at 1:30AM the next morning much to the wife’s disgust :)) light painting session at Sculpture By the Sea.

One thing I love about light painting is that almost all of the hard work is done out in the field perfecting each shot (it can take tens of minutes just to take a single frame) so that:
a) you come back with very few images to even look at let alone post process (yesterday I came back with 32 light painting images including test shots and fails over a 6+ hour period)
b) you have to do almost no post processing on any image – they come out of the camera almost done

During the course of the night we shot six basic compositions/scenes with six different sculptures.

Note: These photographs (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.

We started at the “big red head” right at the end of twilight when it was almost totally dark and most of the visitors had left so we could get some access. Just as we were completing our setup a couple also arrived to take some photos and as luck would have it we had an impromptu model who agreed to participate in a little of our light painting madness

First we have a little before and after action – this first taken pretty much right on sunset (behind us)

Red Setting

NIKON D600 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 60 mm, 1/2 sec at f/11, ISO 100

It was bitterly cold with a very strong icy breeze so I’m not sure how our model managed to stay as still as she did for the 3+ minute exposure. It’s a shame we didn’t get more time to work the scene and do it justice – the light dropped, the temperature plummeted and we only got two takes, but here we have

Red Head

NIKON D600 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 62 mm, 188 sec at f/8, ISO 100

Some before and after action with a sculpture titled “There’s Many a Slip ‘Twixt the Cup and the Lip” by Ken Unsworth – this first just two and a half seconds taken just before 8PM (about half an hour after sunset) so we’ve still got good glow in the sky

Riding into the Sunset

NIKON D600 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 70 mm, 2.50 sec at f/11, ISO 100

Much later (9:20PM) we’re back again, and for this lazy 314 second image the very tall Gerry was able to create the fiery trail behind the bike and on the ground using red & blue EL wire, I’ve painted the ground using a red torch and the bushes with a green torch and we’ve used some zoomable white light torches to backlight and paint the front of our skeletal friend. Nicely positioned clouds provided by nature and lit by city light pollution.

Fire Trails

NIKON D600 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 24 mm, 314 sec at f/8, ISO 100

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