Light painting

Let’s get this out of the way straight off: I don’t like using flash outside of a shoot. It’s bright, it’s obnoxious, and I find it hard to control.

A poor man’s flash is a flashlight and a long exposure. My flashlight was a crappy little LED jobby that dangles at the end of my keychain. It isn’t very bright, but over a long exposure, it does the trick:

Tic Toc Tom (?)

I set my camera up on a tripod, got out the flashlight, opened the shutter (1/2 sec), and sprayed light all over the robot. Because I could direct the flashlight, I was able to get highlights on its chest and face without drawing attention to the surrounding frame. The picture isn’t fantastic, but I’m pleased that the painting highlighted the areas that I care about.

Tree with lanterns. Notice the light patch on the tree trunk and ground at the base of the tree.

On a similar vein, there’s a tree with hanging lanterns. Since I knew that the lanterns were going to be blown out in any image I took, I left the shutter open long enough to paint the tree trunk, base, and foreground leaves with the flashlight. I was hoping that there would be enough light thrown out by my fellow festival goers that some interesting patterns would be thrown onto the sensor. I was in luck: the streak on the foreground and the flash on the mid left add two interesting features. I also lucked out with the lady in the blue sweater – the vivid light blue adds a splash of colour to the pic, and her pink baby sling is almost the same colour is the extinguished lantern beside her. Not intentional elements, but they add to the quality of the pic.

Long exposures

I took the long exposures of the paper baggy labyrinth. There were dozens of people wandering through it, so a short exposure would have caught too many people. Since I’m not a fan of photography without consent, I went for long (15s+) exposures so they’d disappear into the background. The labyrinth was under a set of bright lights, meaning that I had a chance of picking up detail.

Another crop of the labyrinth

I cropped these two so tightly because of the angle: most of the frame was filled with grass at the bottom, and orange sky at the top. None too interesting, so those part of the images ended up in the bit bucket.

Close-up of maze.

The first year I went to Lumiere, I took a picture very similar to this. For some reason, the ordered rings of baggies centered in the right catch my eye. I’ll have to bring a ladder next year to get a more aerial view. I like the streaks and ghostly people.

Conventional Photos

And now, dear reader, you witness my idiocy. Something I knew I should have nailed down my ISO, exposure, and exposure adjustment (ie overexpose by 1.3 stops) before the fire dancers started performing. Did I? No. Did I stick on my 50mm lens and leave it on for the whole performance? No – I fiddled around with a much slower telephoto. Did I trim my flash and use it to improve the colour balance between the dancers and the flame? No.

The pictures aren’t bad, they just aren’t as good as they could have been. The ISO was higher than necessary (with the 50mm lens I should have been shooting at 200 instead of 800), but the duration (.6sec) was perfect. I probably could have dropped the duration down to .4 and caught more of the dancer’s face:

Fire Weaver doing poi

The remaining sundries are decent. If anything, these pictures make me question my lens. The 50mm Pentax lens left weird green ghosts opposite some of the flame. On top of that, the damn thing seemed to lose focus and spend forever hunting around. If I was gutsier, I’d try manually focusing (or letting the camera choose its focal point), but I don’t have the cajones to entrust a once-in-a-year event to my crappy eyes or my camera’s choices.