This weekend’s shooting challenge with Sam and Teejay was lightpainting where one uses a long exposure and various photo-emitting and/or blocking tools to create an image in camera.  I arrived at Teejay’s house after attending a TF2 event where someone got inebriated in under 10 minutes and they were cutting out cardboard of a stormtrooper with what I describe as the Pringles guy moustache.

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Sam taking it in the pooper from a stache-having light-based stormtrooper.

The above was done in three parts, first using an off-camera strobe to generate the stormtrooper through a cardboard cutout with the light being funneled with a cardboard hackjob, then drawing the figure, and then a pilot flash to capture Sam .

Another technique was light-writing which is kinda shown above but what is better shown below:

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So close. Just one dot outside the wings.

This was done with a long exposure (like 22 seconds) while Erin stood in place as Sam did work with a restricted flashlight to do the wings  Erin was filled in with two pilot flashes from another strobe.

My creative contribution was the odd aura-ish crap below:

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He blinked, jerk.

This was done with the flashlight shining directly on the person with a dinner plate behind it to be a reflective surface to generate the whitishness (is that even a word?) of the outline.  If I did it again, I would have added a bit of a fill flash.

Sam left around 4 AM and Teejay and I twaddled for a few hours.  He realized that we didn’t  really accomplish anything in particular and drew up a list of crap to get for next time.  This has happened before with graffiti-ing magic cards and it may happen again: I’m going to go into a Claire’s.

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