The night began as these things usually do. We left at 9 and got half way across town before we realized that we'd forgotten bear spray, Alex's phone, and most importantly...bananas!
An hour later we were back on the road armed with a can of expired bear spray and 5 bananas!
That's when the rain hit. It was just pouring rain all the way out into the mountains. We hoped it would turn into snow the farther north we got, but it kept as nice wet raindrops. Originally, our plan was to go do light painting on a stream out past Bridger, but of course that didn't happen. We decided that it was much to wet to even think about taking out camera's out. We ended up sitting in a construction zone on a back road wondering what to do.
Long story short, we tried a few ideas before we found a awesome loader in said construction zone and decided to light paint that. By that time the rain had let up quite a bit, and so we felt it was safe to bring out the gear.
Light painting got off to a rough start. We all had different camera setting and visions of what we wanted, so we pretty much just took turns with my flashlight. It probably would have been cool to coordinate a bit more, but then there wouldn't have been three different looks. There's always next time.
For my picture, I really had no idea what I wanted! I knew I wanted it to be bright and contrasty, but that's about it. I just hit the loader with light a few times and got some base exposures to composite in Ps later just with layer masks and blending modes. I also lit up a gravel pile behind the loader.
As far as shooting goes, light painting is really just about experimenting and getting a bunch of different looks to then composite later. You can do it in one exposure of course, but it's hard to get the look you can get from compositing. That's a pretty personal opinion though because I really like the look of composited stuff. It will be cool to see what Alex and Nick do, I don't know if they'll composite their photos.
As I said, I just used layer masks and blending modes to composite mine. It's a really simple process so not really worth explaining. Especially, I just painted over the areas of each layer I wanted, and that makes them show up in the composite. I normally paint over the spots of light that I like, and if two spots fall in the same place, those layers go to the lighten blending mode, which takes highlights from each layer and blends them.
Here's the final composite. In Lr I upped the blue saturation and added blue to the shadows. I love the blue light in the cab contrasted with the yellow of the loader. It's pretty awesome.
Also, pics from earlier today with Drew and bikes! It was good to shoot them again.
See you tomorrow!
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