What do you do when your sister comes to stay and after watching the Amazon series Wheel of Time? You take inspiration and after a glass of wine or two, decide to recreate it with your sister as the star.
I'd already thought I could recreate the spell fire effects from the programme using fibre optic brushes.
That said, it would be fun to add a little more, and recreate an iconic scene from the series while she was sat at the dining room table.
With a plain backdrop propped behind her with space to step in between, I used a specialist light painting tool called a Magilight to paint in the back scene. The Magilight is a programmable LED strip with a handle/controller which allows you to 'paint in' scenes and objects during a long exposure photograph much as you would if home decorating with a paint a roller. Instead of physical paint, it makes a trail of light which appears pixel by pixel as you move it (in this case swiping it behind my sister's back).
The entire length of exposure for the photograph was 60 seconds during which time my sister had to stay perfectly still. Within that time, painting in the burning village with the Magilight took 3 seconds. I was dressed in black to prevent me from appearing in the image (the camera only picks up light or objects which reflect light).
Next came creating the spell fire. For this I used a Nitecore MT22c torch which lit a fibre optic brush (from a Spanish supplier called Light Painting Paradise). The tips of the fibres were bounced in her open palms, than swirled around to give the effect of spell fire being cast.
The final stage was to introduce foreground lighting since we were shooting the photo in near darkness and to light her. I used another torch for this.
60 seconds with some additional set up time, and the only post-processing/editing being some exposure adjustment in Lightroom.
For those interested, camera settings were F4.5, ISO100. It took 4 or 5 tries balancing the brightness of the torches/Magilight, but we got there. No actual villages were burned, nor Shadowspawn blasted by her Aes Sedai spell fire during the taking of this photograph!