I'd Rather Be in an Abandoned Pool

I can't disclose the location or what I shot tonight... it never happened and you never read this.

But..

we were in an abandoned pool :) It's been that way for a couple years, and some friends and I thought it would be an awesome place for some light painting. Which turned out to be right. We spent about four hours there, just playing around with lights and very wide lenses.

It was incredibly dusty though, so next time we are wearing masks...like its that bad.

Anywho, back to the light painting. I decided to go with 30 second exposures, which is the longest I can do with out my introvelometer thingy. Probably spelled that wrong but whatever.

For most of the pictures, we all shot with the same settings. 30 secs, f11, ISO800. Why was I using such a high aperture? Well...because of reasons. Mostly, it was to bring everything into focus. In hindsight, it was actually unnecessary and I could have used a much more open aperture with a lower ISO but you know sometimes you gotta branch out. For long exposures, you usually go wide open and with the lowest ISO you can use, not really sure why I didn't do that...I probably had a good reason but I can't think of it at the moment.

So how do you light paint anyway? Well, basically you run around with colored flashlights! That's about it. I just put gels on flashlights and bam...colored lights. We just ran around with them and thats the colored light trails you see.

For the flashes...that's a different story. I couldn't fire a strobe three or six times while the camera was exposing...at least from the camera. To work around the camera, I put on my old remote trigger and receiver on one strobe, then put the other strobe to slave. Works perfect. I also had snoots on the strobes, so they would make that cool spotlight effect. I left the camera exposing for 30 seconds, and then popped the strobe to make the exposure of me that I wanted.

One exposure we went along the bottom wall and for another we went on the top level. All the copies of me are from those two exposures.

I also used a remote trigger so that I wouldn't have to touch my camera and throw frame alinement off.

In Ps, I composited 6 exposure we'd taken. There were a couple for the pool, one of the bottom me's, one of the top me's, one of the ceiling, and one for the upper light trails.

I painted black on layer masks over the parts that I wanted of the exposures, then inverted the masks and I was left with just the parts I wanted! Super simple and fast. I then set the layers to lighten, which helped blend things. I also made a stamp copy layer or whatever it's called, set it to overlay, and applied a high pass filter. This is a way of sharpening the image.

In Lr, I added some noise reduction and that was it. Maybe a touch of highlight bumping.

See you tomorrow!