I’ve tried a number of things to scratch my photography itch during this shut down, from archiving old family photos to freezing flowers. But my favorite thing so far has been to head out in the evening, visit a now-empty local park and do some night photography and light painting. Here’s a little how-to from my latest adventure last night.
Once again I was joined by an old friend, John Sleezer, as it’s easy to social distance outside and I enjoy doing photography with other people. We first scouted a park I hadn’t been to before, but then chose to go to what I felt was a better location that I’d visited in the past, Black Hoof Park. It has woods, water and marshes, and a good paved trail system.
For light painting, I’ve learned that scouting an area before dark is key. Finding your subjects and figuring out camera position and lighting is much easier when you can see what you’re doing. The harder part is pre-visualizing how the scene will look without daylight. For instance, water will just be black unless you create a reflection. As darkness closed in, we’d found a few different locations we thought would work, so returned to the first one and started setting up. Here’s what we did:
Following a dirt trail off the main path, we discovered this little creek scene. I liked the moss-covered rocks as a foreground and the tree with white blossoms as a background. Setting my tripod up with one leg in the creek, and one of my feet there too, this is the “before” shot, with just the remainder of the day’s light. Nikon Z 50, Aperture Priority, Natural Auto white balance, ISO 1000, 1.5-seconds at f/5.6 in Matrix metering, Nikkor AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor 12-24mm f/4G IF-ED lens at 16mm.
Thirty-minutes later daylight was mostly gone, so I switched to Manual exposure and set the camera to heavily underexpose the scene. Then I took a Lume Cube, added a snoot to it and started “painting” light. It’s important to have the light coming from a different direction than the camera, so I used the self-timer on the camera to give me time to move up the creek, across from the blossoms. After painting them for about ten seconds, I came back and leaned in over the rocks to paint each of the moss-covered ones. Nikon Z 50, Natural Auto white balance, ISO 400, 30-seconds at f/10, Nikkor AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor 12-24mm f/4G IF-ED lens at 15mm.
This would be our second shoot, and you can see John in the background as we scouted the area before dark. I hoped that lighting the logs and perhaps the trees in the background, and keeping some sky in the photo, might work out well. Nikon Z 50, Aperture Priority, Natural Auto white balance, ISO 200, 1/15 at f/7.1 in Matrix metering, 0.0 EV, Nikkor AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor 12-24mm f/4G IF-ED lens at 12mm.
And this is how it looked when we returned over an hour later. The clouds are picking up some light from streetlights behind the trees. Nikon Z 50, Manual exposure, Natural Auto white balance, ISO 1000, 20-seconds at f/8, Nikkor AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor 12-24mm f/4G IF-ED lens at 12mm.
After a little experimentation, I chose to use two different LED flashlights to light this. One, with a warm color cast, was used with a snoot to paint the two logs, from above and to the right. The second, with a cooler color temperature, and more power, was used to paint the trees in back from the far right side. The warm light added some color to the logs, the cool light emphasized the green foliage of the trees. A bonus was that the movement of the clouds created nice blur with the long exposure. Nikon Z 50, Manual exposure, Natural Auto white balance, ISO 1000, 25-seconds at f/8, Nikkor AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor 12-24mm f/4G IF-ED lens at 12mm.
I’ve had to cancel all the workshops I had scheduled for this spring and summer, but still want to do photography. And I know that come fall, if I can run the workshops I’m planning for then, people are going to be itching to get out and make pictures. I hope to help them scratch that itch. In the meantime, I’ll keep looking for ways to scratch my own itch, and plan more night time adventures in local parks.
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