After several years acting as a mirror address for this site, LightPainting.org has now been re-launched as a community based site dedicated to light painting. Please go take a look and sign up if you’re interested in light painted photography.

LightPainting.org

If you want to have a go at light painting but don’t have a lot of high-end equipment, have a look at the Light Painting with Basic Equipment article in the Techniques section. It covers basic light painting using a compact camera and a cheap plastic tripod.

Light Painting with Basic Equipment

After documenting my collection of cameras, I’ve just done the same thing for the lights that I use for my light painting work. They can be found in the Lights Gallery (under Techniques in the main menu) with each image containing a link to a gallery of the images taken with that light.

As with the cameras, each light painted image on the site now has a link to the light that lit it at the bottom.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been photographing my collection of cameras. They’re now in their own gallery and each image here is linked to the camera that took it – click on an image and you’ll find the link at the bottom. There are now also individual galleries for the images taken with the Canon 5D, Nikon D100, Nikon F100, Shen Hao HZX45-IIA and the Holga 120GN.

On Wednesday my latest eBay purchase finally arrived from the Ukraine – A LOMO Sputnik stereo TLR. It’s basically two Lubitels fused together – a Bakelite monstrosity with all the light leaks, shiny internal surfaces and dodgy engineering familiar to owners of Soviet cameras. At the very least some internal flocking will be required to make it serviceable.

It is, however, enormous fun and shoots stereo images that are considerably less blurry than my stereo Holga, although that, to be honest, isn’t saying very much.

I shot Kirsty recently using glowsticks and glow-bracelets to create swirls of light. All you have to do is break the glass phial inside them to set them aglow. With the glowsticks that’s quite easy – just snap them – but with the bracelets they’re just too small and so you have to thump the little plastic beads with something and hope they don’t burst open. We got about half of them glowing, which was enough.

Volution

Crux

Univers d’Artistes interview

A big hello to everyone who has found my site from there.

These shots of Fuchsia were taken with my Lensbaby Composer. I’ve always been a fan of Lensbabies and the Composer makes shooting with one much more controllable. Perhaps a little slower than the 3G for some things, but it stays where you put it and makes fine focus changes much easier.

Disconnect

Vivid

Very occasionally I get the chance to shoot an image that has been rattling around in the dark recesses of my brain for ages. In this case I really wanted to take a long-exposure shot of a pole-dancer spinning round a pole while covered in lights that would leave a trail in the air as she moved. The only problems were that I didn’t know any poledancers and I didn’t have access to a pole.

The I met Jade. Not only can she poledance, but she also has a pole.

So we duly wrapped her in electroluminescent wire (battery powered) and she spent a rather energetic hour throwing herself around the pole in the dark. I gave her a very specific pose, and hitting it at the end of her spin was incredibly challenging.

After a few attempts she nailed it perfectly and I got the shot I wanted. It’s good when a plan comes together.

Revolution

Repose (nude)