karen maze photoblog

Last weekend, the two of us drove out to Joshua Tree. We’ve been talking about doing a “Painting With Light” project out there for a long time. If you’re not familiar with the technique, during a long exposure, you use a light source (usually a flashlight, strobe or speedlite) to add to the ambient exposure. You really get the feeling of “painting” when you use a flashlight, because you end up applying using a brushing motion to add light more to certain areas than others, according to your artistic license. It’s a really fun technique - and one I hadn’t done since taking photography classes at Santa Monica College about 8 years ago. We learned a lot on our first outing…

• We”ll be bringing additional flashlights on our next trip. As it was, only one of us could be painting.
• Also, a stop watch. Or just a watch…our “One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand” method of counting out the exposure length was woefully inaccurate, as the EXIF data later revealed.
• Gloves. It gets colder than you think out there.

The results of our efforts are below. I hope you enjoy looking at them as much as we enjoyed taking them. I can’t wait to get out there again soon.

We chose the exposure we wanted for the moonlight and sky, then selectively painted in the foreground with our flashlight. Some post production in Adobe Lightroom.

This was a much longer exposure than the photo above - almost 6 minutes. Just a kiss from the flashlight during the exposure adds extra detail in the tree.

Nothing fancy here. A straightforward silhouette against the desert sky.

It's hard to resist that desert sky.

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-km