I had the privilege of being able to do a night shoot at Fort Edmonton Park a couple of weeks ago. As part of the Painting with Light course that I just completed last Thursday, our instructor arranged a field trip to the park from 7-11. For those who are not familiar with this technique, it basically involves setting your camera on bulb exposure and then"painting" a dark scene using a variety of lights and colored gels. The effect is quite amazing and the results you get are only possible using this technique (unless you were a real master with Photoshop I guess).
Preparation
In preparation for the field trip, I need to arm myself with a few tools. The first was a couple of high powered flashlights from Canadian Tire. I managed to find a couple 1,000,000 candlepower rechargeable lights for around $30 each. The next step was to visit AllStar Show Industries in the west end to get some black foil which I used to create a 'snoot' on the lights. The snoot is wrapped around the front of the flashlight and provides a place to insert your colored gels. The snoot also helps to concentrate and pool the light while cutting down on the amount of spill.
Time Flies
Armed with these tools, freshly charged batteries, my wife's cookies, and thermos full of Tim Horton's coffee, I made my way down to Fort Edmonton Park. The goal was to capture 6 good images in four hours. No problem right? Not as easy as I thought. One of the hardest parts of doing painting with light is setting up your scene. When you're working in the dark and wearing gloves it takes twice as long to try and do anything. Once you do have your scene setup, it then can take anywhere from 3-30 minutes to paint your scene depending upon the amount of available ambient light, your subject, size of the scene. Once you are done painting the scene with your lights, you may leave the lens open for an additional time period to allow ambient light to fill in the background and foreground so your subject doesn't look like it's just floating in the dark. Then, once you have finished, your camera goes into noise reduction mode which can take the same amount of time to complete as your exposure (for more information on noise reduction visit the following Wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_noise). Only once this process has completed will you see the fruits of your labor and discover whether your image is crap or not. If your exposure is off, or you paint too long in an area resulting in blown highlites, or you don't paint enough resulting in a black image; all that time you spent is wasted and you have to go back to the drawing board. Before you know it, 4 hours have gone by and you don't have much to show for your efforts. I'm sure this will get better with experience.
The Results
After 4 hours, I managed to get 12 photos in the can of which, six of which I was pretty happy with. Here are the fruits of my labour.
In the spring Chantal will be organizing another field trip to the Devonian Botanical Gardens so I hope to practice more between now and then so that hopefully I can produce some great images that I can print and frame.
For more information on painting with light or to see more sample images, visit my Chantal Thorlakson's site at www.nightstockphoto.com.
