We headed out to Malabar the other weekend to shoot those funky bunker graffitis.
Brought our whole set of light painting tools:
Torches, celophane, more torches, neon lights, electric luminescent lights, hair spray…

Hair Spray…?
Yes, and a lighter.

Makes for a perfect little flame thrower. Every boy knows that, right?

Brent went inside with it and gave the rusty window a cooking.
This shot is layer-blended out of 8-9 exposures. One for the outside lighting, one for the inside lighting (each floor one exposure), one for the burning window,…

A photography like that can take you 2 hours easily. It is amazing how time consuming night photography is. Especially the kind that we are doing. This is good though, it makes you think about your composition a lot more. The only problem is, when you come home and you really wish you had tilted the camera just a tiny notch more, or zoomed just that little bit more out. Oh well, there is always another day

My friend Brent has been passionate about light painting for a long time, and although we have been out at night countless times to do just that, it was only recently since I added a few of his tricks to my modest repertoire of light painting tools.

The below shot has been taken during the annual Sculpture by the Sea exhibition.
Unfortunately it comes with a truckload of tourists. Serious shooting can only be considered at night.
The more serious photography crowd has realized that and I am delighted to see light painting to be used more and more during my nightly excursions.
Pushing the limits of photography is what drives us all!

Processing:

I light painted this sculpture with blue, red and clear cellophane. As well as lighting up the rock in the background to give some depth to the image.
This resulted in a huge file size in photoshop due to all the layers but I recently upgraded to 6GB RAM, so luckily that was no issue.

That’s right, it is high time to update my blog again. I was mostly without internet on my tours through Europe, the US and the Bahamas.
I have shot 6000 images on this trip and there is a lot to process. I will return home very soon and will report on my adventures with lots of photos as well so stay tuned.
Here is a quick one from Times Square (where 7th Ave meets Broadway) to keep you going

Ok gotta run catch a plane.
Talk soon.

Recently I have been busy stitching all those panoramas that I took during my trip to paris.

I wanted to share some of the ones I really liked so here goes.

I was lucky enough to spend a few weeks in an amazing apartment right next to the Eiffel Tower.

Panoramas are my true passion and I was looking for a great spot with a view to take some panos above the rooftops of Paris.

Every night at midnight, the Eiffel Tower turns of it’s lights. But what many people do not know, is that it starts sparkling one more time at exactly 1 am.

So while everyone has gone home to bed, the most magic moment happens when the Tower is pitch  black, but thousands of tiny flashes light it up for about 10 minutes. They all go off randomly which is purpose, however if you take a long exposure of a few seconds, you will notice that all those flashes will have gone off a few times each. What I love the most about long exposures is that you can record time. Something us humans can not do, so once the 3-6 second exposure was done, you end up with a beautiful Eiffel Tower completely built from those flashes. The whole structure of it is visible on your photo – something that is invisible to the eye.

I was amazed by this and so I stayed up every night til 1am and experiemented with this effect.

I think it is easier to let the photo speak, and you will see what I mean.