About Painting With Light
The meaning of the word Photography
The word Photography literally means ‘drawing with light’, which derives from the Greek photo, meaning light and graph, meaning to draw. Photography is the process of recording an image – a photograph – on lightsensitive film or, in the case of digital photography, via a digital electronic or magnetic memory.
Irish Museum of Modern Art
A Definition Of Light Painting
(We) often hear light painting called a “photographic technique”, (some) believe that light painting is its own art form separate from photography. The camera is simply the instrument that records the light painting art form, just as a canvas captures the brushstrokes of a traditional painter with oils or acrylics. The movement of light, through space and over time is the light painting art form.
PetaPixel
Movement With Fire Works
All of the photographs above are from various visits to the island of Madeira, where, June of each year, the Atlantic Festival is held and at the end of each week there is a firework display.
When I go there, there is a limit to how much luggage I can take and sometimes that has meant a trade-off between clothing and camera gear, and one thing that usually gets left behind is my tripod. A tripod is kind of essential item when trying to photograph fireworks, along with a degree of skill and knowledge if you want to get perfect shots of nice firework explosions.
The next thing to mention is that these fireworks start at around 22:45, after dinner and drinks. The best place I have found for viewing the event is at the Restaurant do Forte, where you get a very good mean and what seems like an over provision of wine.
Another thing you need for good photography is your faculties, and an over provision of wine is a bit of a hindrance.
So, the first time I tried to photograph these fireworks I was not in the best state to take "perfect" photos, so I thought to myself "how do I go about taking imperfect ones?" and "what do I want imperfect ones to look like?".
I wanted them to be striking, fantastical, imaginative, random, weird and all those kind of things. So here they are, hand-held, long exposure, some intentional but random camera movement, and of course, the randomness of the exploding fireworks themselves.
Obviously I get a lot of results that are either awful or too close to the reality of what I saw in the blink of an eye. But some, you just look at and think "I can do something to that!" And so I do something to that in a combination of (always) Lightroom and (sometimes) Photoshop. It is hard to describe what I do exactly as each image is different, but in summary in lightroom the steps are:
- DeNoise
- Crop out extraneous distractions
- reduce highlights
- amplify the black
- increase clariy
- see what next from there!
