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Invalided from work 7 years ago, I've a mind which is still imaginative but a broken body which seizes up and suffers extreme fatigue and pain. On the positive side, I live in a beautiful part of the world and have something I've rarely had in the past. Time. Time to think and time to create, and that's when I discovered light painting (thanks to a friend Stoff who shared a Youtube video of lighting by the incredible Eric Paré).
Youtube has been a wonderful source of learning, time filling and inspiration. Lectures on cosmology, physics and neurology in particular.
Light fascinates me. Electromagnetic radiation, visible to the human eye. The colours we see aren't the colours objects are, but the colours they're not. We see the reflected spectrum of light which objects don't absorb. We see everything upside down and our brains then convert it. We rarely question the information that our eyes give us.
What we see is part real, part illusion and what we think we see is all interpretation. So is art, and every waking hour our brains create it.
Long exposure photography is leaving the lens of the camera open giving the camera the opportunity to absorb more light. It's a technique used in astro-photography, light painting and the water photography I enjoy. Capturing more information than the human eye could process without help and recording it in a way the mind can take in. To me, sight is poor quality video. Imagination is vibrant HD, and can be whatever we want. Mine resembles a cross between a Guardians of the Galaxy movie and as my daughter jokes, a 12 year old's disco. My imagination pops neon.
Light painting is my way of capturing imagined images and sharing them. What exists bio-chemically stored in my head, recreated by manipulating photons (light) and then captured digitally (by the camera). It's a magical world.
For light painting, I use fibre optic brushes to bend light, lasers and prisms to focus it, ultra-violet paints and lighting to make objects glow, phosphor coated (EL) wire with a current run through it to make it appear neon, specialist light tools (some custom made) and more traditional light sources like flash and fixed panel lights. The speed you move light while light painting, how you place it, its intensity and whether it's constant or strobed all impact the result.
As Laura DelPrato beautifully said, light painting is recording objects and light moving in space time (the fourth dimension) in a two dimensional photograph.
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