An iterative process ... by David Sundstrom

As I write this the FSC Contrast exhibit only has a few days left (closes Sunday April 11)

I thought I’d add a few details on one of the shot’s I’m exhibiting as a few people have asked how it was done.

In essence it is a light painting shot, the exposure was just a little under 2 mintues and was shot with my Nikon D300 and 18-70 lens.

The tree was illuminated from behind using a blue LED light strip, each of the girls was then lit by my flash with a blue gel on it and then the front of the tree was lit with a large rechargeable torch. The red ropes were created using a single red LED.

The shot was then cleaned up in Photoshop and Lightroom 3 (no major changes, I just cleaned up a few distracting background objects, then adjusted the contrast, crop etc).

The interesting thing with these shots is that I actually arrived at them after going through a series of light painting experiments. Basically I’d decided that I wanted some light painting shots for the exhibit and kept experimenting with the shots until I had arrived at the ones used for the exhibit.

And finally soem shots of the tools used to make the shots …