OPINIONS PLEASE!

We need to get this settled once and for all.

What are your thoughts on Photoshopping your Light Painting? Honestly who hasn’t adjusted levels or tweaked the saturation…..

I personally always feel that a “TRUE” light painting should be SOOC. I think its way better to get it right in the camera than to tweak the S@#! out of it….

HOWEVER we have all photoshopped an image even if it was just a slight crop, if you say you haven’t your LYING.

I think these rules from the National Geographic Photo Contest are a pretty good start for the guidelines of digital manipulation and Light Painting…

YOUR THOUGHTS PLEASE.

A message about digital manipulation from the Executive Editor of Photography at National Geographic magazine:

Please submit photographs that are un-manipulated and real, and that capture those special moments in time. The world is already full of visual artifice, and we don’t want the National Geographic Photography Contest to add to it. We want to see the world through your eyes, not the tools of Photoshop.

Please do not digitally enhance or alter your photographs (beyond the basics needed to achieve realistic color balance and sharpness). If you have digitally added or removed anything, please don’t submit the shot. We look at every photo to see if it’s authentic, and if we find that yours is in any way deceptive, we’ll disqualify it. In case of the winners, we will ask for the RAW files, if available, to be submitted for review.

DODGING AND BURNING: Dodging (to brighten shadows) or burning (to darken highlights) is fine, but please don’t overdo it.

COLOR SATURATION: Just as with dodging and burning, your goal should be to make it real. Please avoid significant over- or under-saturation. A lot of photographers make the mistake of over-saturating color, making their images look cartoonish.

SOLARIZATION, MEZZOTINT, DUOTONE, ETC.: These are discouraged as being too gimmicky. There are a myriad of alteration “filters” available in digital photo software; try not to be swayed to use them. They may be cool and fun, but they won’t help you in this contest.

BLACK-AND-WHITE IMAGES: Acceptable

CROPPING: Acceptable

We could all learn something from Jukka Laine. Eight years ago Jukka was working for a company creating lighting design for the city. It was at that time he started to feel the need to do something more meaningful with his time, eventually the Valopaja Light Painting workshops for the mentally and physically challenged was born, here is how it happened…

LPP ∇ Can you tell me a little about your background and how you started working with light?
JL ∇ About eight years ago I was working in a company that designed lightings to city areas; parks, streets, buildings etc. I wanted also do some voluntary work and in 2006 I started as a volunteer friend for a mentally disabled man (I´m still meeting him once in a month). After one year of voluntary work I started to do a part-time job in a club for mentally disabled people. And then in another club, and in another club… It was much more fun than work in the office from nine to five so in 2008 I made a huge change and quit my job and went to work as a social worker (assistant in schools etc).

LPP ∇ So the Valopaja light painting workshops were born out of this change in your life?
JL ∇ While I was working one day I got this idea of what mentally disabled people would think of making shadows with lights. The first evening was a success, some of the participants said that it was incredible. In that time, five years ago, I didn´t have light painting including the workshops. Only shadow installations with LED´s, wire and glass. I started to arrange light workshops for mentally disabled people and got very good feedback.

LPP ∇ How did the light painting come into the workshops?
JL ∇ At that time I had a pocket camera and by a mistake I found that it´s possible to do light paintings with it (15 seconds exposure). This was a huge step for my light workshops that I started to call Valopaja. Valo is finnish and means light and paja means workshop. With this new possibility to make light paintings I expanded my working area and arranged workshops for people with adhd, CP, visual impairment, hearing loss, memory illness, autistism etc. But I also arranged workshops for normal children and adults.

LPP ∇ What were some of the first light paintings that you created and what was the reaction from the people involved?
JL ∇ A few years ago I worked as a personal assistant for a man with a wheelchair. One day I had an idea: “You have a wheelchair and I have LED´s , let´s put them together”. In the next evening we attached the lights to the wheelchair and went outside to do some light paintings. He really liked it and told that he has now a wheelchair 2.0. It was very cool even without Light Painting. After that I did a wheelchair light paintings with disabled people but also with older people. One elderly man said that he has had his wheelchair for 20 years but now it´s really useful.

LPP ∇ What are some of the greatest benefits that the participants get out of your light painting workshops?
JL ∇ It´s about doing group work with other people, more important than the final image is the thing that people do during the photo shoot. In the dark room it´s also easier to get people to talk and tell some stories with a help from the shadows on the wall. It´s like watching clouds and imagining what they look like.

Light painted portraits are also a great way to make disabled people visible. I mean that they are usually categorised as B-class people but especially light painted portraits make them visible and in every workshop I have a projector to project portraits on the wall.

LPP ∇ What are some of your challenges?
JL ∇ Working with mentally challenged or autistic people who don´t understand how a shadow or light trail is done can be difficult. Some of the participants lack the motor skills to create a light painting themselves but for that we get creative and will attach light sources to their wheelchairs so they can still be a part of the light painting process.

LPP ∇ How did light painting photographers Janne Parviainen and Hannu Huhtamo get involved in your project?
JL ∇ In 2010 I was surfing in Flickr.com and found pictures of light painted skeletons. Those were light painted in Helsinki so I send message to Janne Parviainen. He was excited about my workshops and told that we should do collaboration with his friend Hannu Huhtamo. Since then we have had workshops in some big events in Helsinki.
We have this real-time light painting software and besides making shows we give people a chance to try real-time light painting. There´s one video where mentally disabled people dance with lights in their hands.

LPP ∇ Are you planning on expanding the workshops?
JL ∇ Yes, the next step is to teach light art to those young adults who are homeless and having problems with drugs. Next autumn I will also have a light art course in University of Helsinki

LPP ∇ The work you are doing is awesome and inspiring I hope that other light painters will try to do something similar in their own communities and continue to spread the light!

Learn more about Valopaja HERE.

Michael Bosanko has a light painting style that is magical, beautiful, and instantly recognizable as his own. Michael’s latest series “Illuminating Artist” takes his style to a whole new level of excellence! Check out these incredible new images and the short interview I did with Mr. Bosanko to find out a little more about his new work…

LPP ∇ Michael your new series Illuminating Artist is awesome can you tell me a little more about your inspiration for the series?
MB ∇ There’s always been a nagging sensation in the back of my head with the terms ‘light painting’ and light graffiti’. I’ve heard it be called other things, like light sculpting, ‘bright dancing’(which makes me shudder!) and light play. Getting back to the term ‘light painting’ and ‘light graffiti’, I found myself questioning these terms, and how they really apply to light art. Over the years, my style constantly evolves, and steadily I have been treating my light tools like paint brushes, rather than ‘effect makers’. I make no secret about always finding inspiration from the environment, painters, and photographers, and recently, I’ve been bookmarking famous paintings and studying them, looking for something to jump out at me. And then it hit me; all these paintings I’ve been looking at are inspirations themselves, so I put myself up the challenge of interpreting them by using light. It was never going to be easy, but that’s why I liked it; I would be ‘painting’, for real, with lights, and it would be a welcome side project away from my usual work; something to get my teeth into.

LPP ∇ Will you be Illuminating more artist or is the series complete?
MB ∇ To date, I’ve completed four pieces, but plan a few more over the next few weeks before I draw the project to a close.

LPP ∇ Which image or section of a particular image was the most difficult?
MB ∇ So far, each image has presented its own unique challenges. For a start, everything has to be freestyle, and as usual, nothing will get edited. If I make a mistake, I start again. Simple. Technically, the Vitruvian Man was difficult. I wasn’t ‘drawing’ around a person. I had to keep my movements rigid, and completely rely on memory mapping. The Scream relied on a deep vanishing point, so perspectives had to be as near to spot on as possible. The Balloon Girl was a weird one. The original Banksy is very two dimensional. For that one, I imagined that light was an object, and tried to picture how wind would blow it. That was quite a surreal head moment for me!

LPP ∇ Which of the four you have completed is your personal favorite?
The Starry Night, on paper, looked like the easiest to do, but in reality it was a compositional nightmare. It took several attempts and a change of tact each time. It looks like a flat composition, but in reality I used a lot of three dimensional space. It was my personal favourite, and coincidentally, I did the piece under a bright moon and starry night. It seemed fitting.

LPP ∇ Thank you for answering a few questions, keep up the amazing work!

Light painting photographer, Digital Light Wand Inventor, and all around genius Michael Ross a.k.a TxPilot has given yet another gift to the light painting community. Building off some upgrades made by Flickr handle is0-Mick, Mr. Ross has reinvented what is possible with this amazing light painting tool! Here’s whats new…

The new Digital Light Wand’s have up to 60 LED’s per meter as opposed to 32 on the old models and they have been upgraded with all the following menu items that can be manipulated in the field:

1 – File Selection
2 – Brightness setting
3 – Initial Delay time
4 – Frame Delay (how long each pixel frame is displayed)
5 – Dual Delay (adjustment for interlace offset, depends on the speed the wand is normally used)
6 – Left to Right or Right to Left
7 – Number of times to repeat the same file
8 – Repeat delay (delay between repeats)
9 – Push On/Off Mode (Push button to start, repeats until button is pushed again.) (Great for pattern repeats)

Check these sample images and keep reading below for even more details!

LPP ∇ Hey Mike I see you upgraded your Digital Light Wand, can you tell us whats new….

MR ∇ The Digital Light Wand has gone through some changes since the first one I created three and half years ago. There have been a few varying designs based on the original and each of them made the use of the tool in the field more convenient. The most recent changes incorporate some new LED strips that have been made available recently that feature a higher density of LEDs per meter and full color manipulation compared to the original Addressable LED strips. These new strips now have 52 and even 60 LEDs per meter compared to the 32 LEDs per meter of the original. The color range is also much easier to deal with from a programming standpoint and there are a full 2.1 million colors easily available in these new strips.

LPP ∇ Sounds awesome what inspired the upgrade?

MR ∇ A guy that goes by the name of iso-mick on flickr changed the original design a while back and incorporated an SD card along with an LCD display so that several BMP files could be stored and played back on demand while in the field without having to reprogram the strip between each use! So taking iso-mick’s work, I have made some changes to the programming code to allow two of the higher density LED strips to be placed side by side with an offset to gain a greater resolution in the final image. Without getting into the technical challenges that this represents in making this work for a variety of light painters, I made some further changes to the programming code to allow for making fine tuned adjustments in the field. There are several variables that can occur such as how fast the wand is moved during the creation of a light painting photo. There are also other variables involved such as the preference of moving the wand from right to left instead of from left to right and of course just dealing with different levels of ambient lighting. Once a light painter is comfortable with specific settings on the new version of the Digital Light Wand, they can choose those defaults and only make minor adjustments between uses.

LPP ∇ Whats up with the software does it work with for us Mac users too?

MR ∇ There are versions of the Arduino software for Windows, MAC, and Linux so as long as you can format an SD card to the proper format and create 24-Bit BMP files of the images you want use, then you should be good to go!

I have the Arduino code ready to download on my website along with detailed wiring diagram, parts lists, and basic assembly instructions. And if you run into any issues, just post a question on the blog. There are plenty of others willing to help out with it!

LPP ∇ Awesome work Mr. Ross, Thank you for sharing!