The winner of the Light Painting Photography contest titled “Light Being” is… Dennis Berka, A.K.A Ryus Light Works, for the super cool image above! You might look at this image an wonder how the heck it was created in a single exposure, well there were a lot of steps involved as you will see from the description below! Here is what Dennis said about his complex winning image!
“The photo was created in the ruins of an old tar production building. The place is usually a swamp below the pillars you see in the photo, but one summer here was so hot that it dried up. So I decided to go there with two fellow lightpainters and try out a technique I played around with at that time. For the Fire Golem I placed a small bit of shaped steel wool on a black metal sheet and put up a tripod next to it. I used an old analog Nikkor zoom lens that had a macro setting so it was easy to set focus on the little figure. It was about the size of a smartphone. Next I positioned another tripod for the scene you see in the photo and put a manual wide angle lens on the camera. After setting the scene I drew a circle on the screen of my camera with a non permanent whiteboard marker to mark where the fire golem was supposed to appear. Back to the steel wool figure to align it to fit inside the circle on the camera screen. Once everything was prepared and my friends placed in the scene I closed down the aperture of the zoom lens nearly all the way, lit the steel wool with a lighter and started the exposure. Once it was fully burned through (with the help of a few blows of air) I capped the lens, swapped it to the wide angel and switched tripods to the one for the scene. Now cap off the wide angle lens and the only thing left to do was walk into the scene to the place where the fire golem is supposed to stand and light the scene from there in red. I used a technique that Pala Teth demonstrated a few times here hiding the flashlight from the camera. The last touch was to add a little lake blue light to the shadows of the scene to make them visible a bit more. The rest of the light came from street lanterns a little bit to the side of the place that produced a real nice texture on the pillars because it was shining through large bushes. I played around with this technique quite a lot and have refined and used it a lot of times since then to create a lot of fantastic photos that people always wonder about how they were made.”
You can check out more of Dennis’s Light Painting work on his Facebook and Instagram pages linked Below:
https://www.facebook.com/RyusLightworks
https://www.instagram.com/ryuslightworks
The Models for this image were the Light Painting Duo Night Lights: https://www.facebook.com/Nightandlights/
For this winning Image Dennis will receive a prize package filled with light painting tools and treasures from our sponsors COAST Flashlights, Neon Flexible and Light Painting Brushes ! Please support these awesome companies that support our light painting art from, without them this contest series would not be possible!
If you would like to enter the next Light Painting Photography contest click here for all the details.
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