Light painting during the day...

So I had my camera and tripod (The best camera is the one you have with you right...) while I was at my parent's yesterday. The temperatures have risen and there has been a lot of rain this week causing all the snow to melt and everything to flood.

My mom and I took my son for a drive so he could take a nap and so we could grab lunch. While uptown in Dundee I suggested we stop in town so I could take some photos of the flooding. I walked around the shore on the north side of the river and managed to snap a couple shots. I was only out with my camera for may 5 minutes. I did not want to stop to long and find out my son woke up in the car crying with my mom in there.

We then drove around and looked at all the other flooding in the area while my son slept for another 45 mins or so. When we got back to my parents my son was still asleep and I told my mom that I wanted to try something with my camera in there barn. I have been really wanting to just go for a photo walk somewhere but havn't had the time or weather to really do much lately. So I take what I can get when I have an opportunity comes to sharpen my photo skills.

So I grab a flashlight from the cabinet and go into the dark barn with my camera and tripod. I figured with such a dark area it would give me the opportunity to do some light painting where each hole in the wall would expose stream of bright light. Creating an interesting illumination of the 100+ year old structure of the barn.

So the first thing that went wrong was the flashlight I grabbed was almost dead and did not really provide enough light to do the light painting I really wanted to do. So I figured I would try composite multiple exposures lighting up individual areas of the photo and utilizing a hard lighting angle to bring out the details in the wood. To do this my plan was do during the exposure stand at the bottom of the wall and shine up the wall. With the dim flash light it did not provide enough light to over power the little bit of light the shined through the walls. What the dim light did do was allow me to bring out areas that I were in so much shadow that I could light that area up to have details in post processing.

The second thing that went wrong that I did not anticipate was the floor of the loft that I had set my tripod on moved with every movement that I made. So I carefully went from place to place to do the light painting. Well the majority of my shots ended up with some blur in it.

So I had a couple that I was happy with how things looked on the LCD of the camera (which you never can rely on) but I zoom in on the photos and they looked good. Later in the night I decided to take a look at what I got and see if I could blend anything together or what. I decided instead of blending multiple photos with different areas of the photo light painted to a photo with the shadows light painted and edit that. Each time I took a photo it looked like my camera and tripod had shifted a little with the movement of the floor. I did not want to try to align anything and I don't any of the other exposures provided me anything.

During my post processing in Lightroom I used adjustment brushes to do some of the light painting that gave me some of the lighting I wanted. I changed the white balance in some areas for example in both photos the area of the roof the exposure has been turned down to make it look more like it is in shadows and I changed the white balance to a cooler tone. Like wise the ladder structure I warmed up the white balance and turned up the exposure a hair to make it the first thing your eyes go to when you look at the photo.

There did a little bit of adjusting the exposure and coloring of each area of the photo which included the roof section, ladder structure, walls on each side of the ladder, the wall structure and the holes that let light in and came up with each photo.

I'd like to try this composition again with shorter exposures and a brighter flashlight and my 8 mm lense. I would then actually try to blend different light painted areas of the photo into one composite.