Recently I had a chance to to Rome for the LPWA meetup.  I had a great time meeting other light painters from around the world and I got to give a presentation called Available Light about using infrared and full-spectrum photography in light painting.  I recorded the video on my infrared camera and Reagan recorded it on her phone as well.  I put the two together and have shared the resulting video on Vimeo.

Just prior to the Rome trip I took inspiration from a discussion on the Camera Rotation group on Facebook and made a slight modification to the device that Juls Boo had posted.  I put together a video for that one as well to show how to put it together and how it works.

Check them both out over on my tutorials page!

I took a break but I'm back in the game.  Part of my return was fueled by finally getting my hands on my Fractal Filters order.  Sometimes post-Kickstarter an order gets lost in the cracks and that was the case with mine.  To their credit, they were amazingly responsive on the order I placed since then for a friend.

Prism, infrared, on-white, on-location-on-white.  New people to shoot, new people to shoot with.  It's time to keep that camera going again.

This particular shot is Michelle, through Fractal Filters with Light Painting Brushes black fiber as a light tool.

I also have some exciting news and that news might be the subject of my next blog post!

I just released the initial version of Mosaic Now.  Bascially it's a Processing.org script that takes a file feed from a live camera and lets you build mosaic light painting images with a live preview and editing ability.

Check it out 

I just posted a new tutorial on using Iridescent Gift Foil as a Lighting Effect.  Click the sample shot below or the link to see the full content.

Geoff Decker and Andrew Vega joined me tonight and we played around some more with infrared light painting.  We got some cool shots. Some were pure infrared, some were full spectrum, some were part infrared and part visible.  This was one of my favorites...

On Wednesday I received the package with my new full-spectrum camera. This is essentially a regular digital camera where the infrared filter at the sensor has been removed and the sensor has now become sensitive to all wavelengths of light, visible or not.

I received another package with an infrared flashlight. That puppy is weird. It produces only light waves that are invisible to the human eye. When I put the batteries in there was no way to see that it was working until I looked at it through my full-spectrum camera in live view.

I opted for full-spectrum over a straight infrared camera because I had an idea. The idea was to do a single light painting shot where some of the light was captured exclusively in the infrared spectrum and some of the light was from the visible spectrum.

 I've been a serious light painter for two and a half years now.  I started by learning some basic tools and what I could do with them.  After a time I returned to my background of being a studio model photographer and really focused on using light painting techniques in model photography.  During that time I really focused on the model rather than the lights; the lights were a tool but the picture was really more about the person.

I got a chance to shoot with a new friend a week or two ago and asked her if she wanted to try something more experimental.  You see, early on I saw the work of Aurora Crowley and wanted to try some stuff in that vein.  I've barely interacted with Aurora and I don't know how much of his stuff is in-camera and how much of it is post but I loved his style and wanted to see what I could do with that as inspiration.  He shot with models, he shot with lights, he shot on non-black backgrounds, he composed shots and also let them drip with emotion.  When she said she liked the idea of experimenting... it was time to experiment.

This is a new style I'm unveiling and I expect to shoot a lot more of it in the near future.  A big thanks to her for doing this with me.  We had a blast and it's the start of things to come.Some black and white, some color, some images that involve models but also very much involve the lights.  It's time to flow and emote!

I just posted a new tutorial on how to create light painting images with white backgrounds.  Lots of sample pics, two different techniques, tips for making colored backgrounds or backgrounds with specific stencil patterns too. Check it out here!

Today the world lost an artist that moved a lot of people.  Kaitie Amen and I had already planned to shoot tonight and to do a Bowie-inspired lightning stencil.  We came up with three Bowie pieces and then shot three comic pieces that are worth checking out.  As always with all of my work, all light was created and captured in a single long exposure.   Camera Raw was used to balance some levels but otherwise what you see is exactly what we saw on the back of the camera when the shutter closed!

You can buy prints of these pieces here.

View on site

If you made my Skytalks talk in Vegas this past weekend thank you so much!  It was exciting to see so many people running around wearing badges I designed!

I promised links to my presentation.  I have modified it slightly to include some more of what I said while the slides were up.  Download them and check them out!  Powerpoint and Keynote formats.