I wasn’t able to post last week so this week will include my iteration and failure of last week as well as a my working product.
Pass 1
Most of my supplies arrived much later than anticipated so I had to improvise with what to work with last week. The first order that came was my smoke flares that I had hoped to experiment with. I took a colored LED light to color the smoke and shot outside, but the smoke effect and practical product didn’t quite come out as hoped. The hardest part was getting the correct focus. Since my subject was clouded in smoke, the auto-focus on my camera didn’t work so I had to manually put my subject in focus which can be more inaccurate and make the depth of field less controlled. The top 2 photos above are the two best photos that I captured, and though the long exposure creates a cool ephemeral motion blur effect, the overall composition was not as visually interesting as I had hoped.
Pass 2
After giving up on the smoke photography, my LED spotlight came in and I went to practice light-painting portraiture. Below are some of my first attempts at experimenting first with dual light combos and lighting palettes, and then adding in short exposure shots to add visually interesting elements to the photos.
I like the potential that this avenue had as a product, but there were various things that I felt needed fixing. First off, Most of the pictures were quite blurry. I knew this was a potential issue heading into the project especially considering the long exposure would force the subject to be extremely still, which can be a difficult task. While a little motion blur has a cool effect I think, too much would blur the fine line between contrasting colors that I was going for. I also needed to practice the speed at which I was light painting, since I generally wanted the light lines to be solid rather than staggered and choppy, as seen in the two photos on the right side above. I also wanted the lighting to be more drastic and contrast more, since I felt the back lighting was a little washed out and not colorful in these photos.
Pass 3
I went back for another photo shoot with the same methodology as the last iteration, but with a better plan for how to fix the issues I was experiencing in the last shoot. Unfortunately, wordpress seems to have broken and isn’t letting me upload most of these photos even though I sized them down to 500kb. Hopefully I will figure out how to resolve this by next post.
