Patrick Brosset Photos

Two weeks ago now, me and a bunch of friends went down in an old pedestrian tunnel below the railway station to see if we could do some nice light painting shots.

It turned out this tunnel also had an entrance to the water drain system of the city, a series of tunnels so long you could walk hours in it! … Well ok, we only walked in there for 10 minutes or so just to see what it was like, but it seemed to just continue for ever.

So the whole thing is just a tunnel, about 1m50 in diameter (so we had to crouch to walk in there), completely dark and with a little stream of water at the bottom (it’s very dry these days here, so there’s almost nothing, but I guess that when it rains like hell, which it does from time to time, the tunnel must be almost completely filled with water).

Below are some of the photos I came up with.
Benoit was here too and he did some very nice photos from the pedestrian tunnel as well.

Hi folks, as I’m once again really getting into light painting, I thought I’d do another post on this topic.
In this one, I’ll try to cover gears and inspiration links.

For the gears part I’ll try to list as many equipment that I’ve used or heard of being used in light painting. It is often quite hard to identify what type of light is used in a particular photo and photographers are not always keen on sharing on the gears they’re using. Most of the stuff used in this type of photos are often things that were never intended for this, DIY objects, recycled stuff, etc … and just creating or finding this or that piece of gear is part of the final photo itself and as such I guess a lot of photographers are a bit reluctant just giving the solution away.

For the inspiration, nothing beats having a look at what other people do, and for this Flickr is a huge help. I have a few contacts their that are really mind blowing in the light painting photos that they do so I’ll try to share these.

Gears

Flashes

By flash, I mean the flash that you normally mount on your camera. It’s useful to have a couple of them in your bag in order to easily get powerful light exactly where and when you want it. A flash’s light is very powerful and also very short so you can’t use it for anything that involves movement and deliberate motion blur. You can however use it to fill objects with light, change its color with translucent plastic stuff, use it behind a stencil (see below) etc …
It can also come handy if you want to make a person or another subject appear in the scene after you’ve done the light painting you wanted.

Camping flashlight

This is the really basic stuff that you absolutely need to have, and probably not only one. Their really good cause their small so they are easily moved around to achieve the shape you want. However their really not that powerful and almost always whitish/yellowish colored (not talking about LED here). You might want to gel them.

Fireworks

Ok, with this one, light painting is getting a bit dangerous and you really ought to know what you’re doing and where you’re standing. I’ve personally never used this but I’ve seen it in some photos. They look really impressive but again, this is the big stuff, to be used with caution.

LED lights

It seems these new types of LED lights are now everywhere, in many different shapes. It can be a small camping flashlight with a couple of LEDs or a utility light with a 100 LEDs that you might have lying around in your car for repairing the engine. These lights are awesome, they’re really powerful and very very white. Again, you can cover them with colored plastic to get something nicer.
If you know your way around electric stuff, you can even make custom lights by purchasing LEDs by the unit and pluging everything together with a battery.

Christmas light strings

I don’t know what’s the exact name of these stuff, probably fairy lights or something. Of course, these must be battery powered so you may use them wherever you want. They work great when attached to something else, like a stick, a wheel, etc …

Birthday sparklers

These are little sticks you ignite with a lighter to  produce sparkles. They don’t last for very long though, so try and bring as many as you can. Again, this type of equipment work good when attached to something, like a string that you can wave around in some fashion.

Bicycle wheels

I realized very recently that a wheel from an old bicycle could be awesome for light painting. I haven’t tried it but I’ve seen photos done with it and it’s incredible. The principle is that you can attach any type of light you want along the wheel and then just make spin along a wall or on the ground to achieve a very nice geometrical pattern of light.

I couldn’t include the photo I wanted to show here, so just go over to THEM_chernobyl_BUDS Flickr page to see the amazing shots he does with his wheel.

Stencils

Stencils are basically sheets of paper or cardboard or pieces of cereal boxes, etc … that only allow light to go through a determined shape. What you have to do is put a flash behind one of them and pop it during your exposure. For instance, you can print something in black and white on a regular piece of paper and put this piece of paper on the opened side of a small DIY softbox, then put a flash (or a powerful LED light for that matter) in the box.

Neutral density filters

Neutral density filters, or grey filters can help you either increase the aperture or the exposure time on your camera by reducing the quantity of light that goes through the lens. As such, they can be very useful when you’re trying to do light painting in an area where there is a little bit too much light. Maybe this light is coming from the full moon, or from public lights, or maybe you’re shooting indoor and you want some of the lights in the house to stay on. Because of these extra light sources, you will often have to decrease your exposure time to avoid over-exposing the shot. With a grey filter you can save worthy seconds of exposure.

Tripod

Since you’ll be shooting most of your photos with an exposition time of 20 seconds to a couple of minutes or maybe more, you’ll need the camera to stay very very steady during all this time. A tripod is great for this cause you can have your camera virtually anywhere you want, but a table would do, or the ground or any flat surface.

Remote control

A remote control can have 2 advantages. First of all it allows you to trigger the camera without having to touch it and as such you are totally sure that the camera doesn’t move during the shot. And secondly, if you have many things to do during the shot and you’re alone, and you don’t have that much time, not having to run from the camera to the place you’re lighting can be helpful and save you a couple of seconds (this only applies to wireless remotes of course, but don’t worry, they sell for almost any type of cameras for quite cheap on ebay I think).

Tupperware or Lampshade

The whole goal of tupperwares, plastic containers, lampshades, etc … is to modify the light your producing from your bare flash light and flash head. They can help change the shape and color.

Mobile phone

Nowadays cell phones have huge screens and are very bright, for this reason they can be very nice little light painter brushes. The biggest advantages to me is that you always have one around.

Computer neon lights

All of you geeks that like to personalize their computer boxes with glowing neon lights, you’ve got great lighting gears. The only thing you’ll have to do is power them up with batteries.

Batteries

Well, as you’ve probably noticed, almost all of the equipment mentioned previously is battery powered, so you’ll need a lot of it. I’m using my flashes with softboxes and stencils quite a lot, so I need 4 new AA batteries quite often. Don’t forget them! Also, when doing long exposures with your camera, you’ll notice it uses more battery than during normal sessions. Having an extra battery for the camera as well is a must.

Gaffers tape, strings, ropes

You never know what you’ll have to tape up, so just take it with you. You’ll thank yourself that you did so when you’ll try to tape some light around your body and run to see what it does.

Inspiration links

I spend an awful lot of time on Flickr.com and I’m always discovering new people that are into light painting. So if you’re looking for inspiration, take a look at some of the links below:

Contacts of mine

BURNBLUE

artandsteel

jannepaint

THEM_chernobyl_BUDS

DividedSky

RecycleBean

Kaalam

Lapp-pro.de

Groups

http://www.flickr.com/groups/lightpainted/
http://www.flickr.com/groups/lightjunkies/
http://www.flickr.com/groups/paintingwithlight/
http://www.flickr.com/groups/unspokenword/
http://www.flickr.com/groups/lightwritings/
http://www.flickr.com/groups/594829@N24/
http://www.flickr.com/groups/trippy/

If you know other websites showcasing nice light painting work, please do share in the comments.

Also, if by any chance you leave near Antibes and you know nice places in the area to take night shots (abandoned green houses, tunnels, etc …), please share as well!

Have fun!

Urban explorations, or Antibes photo shoot.

We’ve started to do them a couple of weeks ago with Julian and Benoit. They’re great ways to learn new stuff in photography, adapt to the environment, wander around and focus on the things you don’t normally see.

The 2 first photos above were taken in the streets of the old part of the city of Antibes. The third one was taken during a photo session we spent in one of the abandoned glass houses in Antibes. And the fourth one is just to let you see how these kind of sessions can look from the outside … hmm no comment.

The next step now would be to discover more great, abandoned places in Antibes or elsewhere, empty buildings or stuff like that and try and bring life to them again with a mix of flash photography and light painting, at least that’s what I’d like to give a try to. There is plenty of inspiration out there for this!

A mix of soft light and shadows, playing on suggested body curves and skin texture.

We did a new type of photo shoot session the other night. I absolutely wanted to start learning on how to build an image by controlling the quantity and quality of light I was adding to the scene.

So the idea was to start with a simple setup: 2 flashes, one at either sides of the model, left and right. You can see a picture of it below:

As you can see I don’t have an empty room where I can do these sorts of thing, so it had to be done in the living room, packed between the desk and the couch, and I had to put up a black sheet in the back to have at least a (tiny) place where I was sure to get a pure black background. For info, I tried without it several times and it always failed no matter how much I closed my aperture. I think what was happening is that there was always a little bit of light coming out of the flashes that would light up the background as well. In fact, to avoid this to happen as much as possible, I used cardboard pieces to force the light to go in one direction only (for info, these stuff have names too! gobos and snoots! find out more about them at strobist.com).

I shot all my photos with a 135mm F2.0 fixed focal from Canon which is impressively sharp. Since I own a Canon 350D camera, which is not a full-frame camera, this lens acts more like a 200mm tele (because of the field of view crop factor). So just to say that it was quite a challenge to take picture with this in the small living room (I had to stand about 4 meters away).

The nice thing about this is that I was able to focus on one part only of the subject which added even more to the kind of secrecy and privateness feel of the scene.

A couple more shots below:

I like to do light painting photos now and then. They’re really fun to do and often give amazing results. If you have a look at my Flickr stream, you’ll see some of them.

This particular photo was taken during one of our “Antibes group photo sessions”. We’ve done a couple of them so far and it’s quite fun. You can learn a lot from these group sessions. The idea is you just go somewhere with fellow photographers and you try and agree on a general theme. Then you just let your imagination go and hopefully you should end up with nice results. The whole idea is to inspire each another.

For this photo, we went to visit an abandoned glass house (or green house) in Antibes during the night. I have to say it could have been a little dangerous because the ground was covered in glass pieces and we couldn’t see much. But still it was cool, we experimented a bit with light painting.

On this photo, only one flash light was used. I’d really like to go back there with lot’s of people and lot’s of different flash lights to try and light the whole structure with nice light trails all over the place.

If you’re new to light painting and you like this technique, have a look at some of the other photos I’ve done below: