From time to time we come across a light painting and just stare it wondering how the F@#! did they do that?!?! For my own sanity and to hopefully enlighten some of rest of the light painting community I am starting a new series on the LPP website called Break Down. Basically if you put out some crazy, confusing, mind boggling, or just plain different work that the rest of us can’t figure out I am going to harass you to share some of your secrets. Now relax, I am not going to ask for a step by step so we can all rip you off. I am asking for just a piece of inside knowledge maybe a little hint as to how you’re creating your compelling work! I will only ask the artist one question “How the F@#! did you make this” its up to the artist to tell as little or as much as they want.

For the first one in the Break Down series we are prying open the mind of Light Painting Photographer Mart Barras for this WTF image:

Mart how the F@#! did you make this?

Here is the Break Down:
GEAR USED
Camera: Nikon D7100
Lens: 18-35mm
iPad with Stand
Custom Camera Rotation Tool
Magic

Settings:
F-Stop: F16
ISO: 100
Exposure Time: 93 seconds

IPAD as the Light Source.
Basically it like using stencils but doing it from an iPad.

Capping The Lens
You expose one at a time, each image to the lens (capping the lens between images).

Masking and Camera Rotation
It does require some masking, and a lot of lining up to get parts of the image to sit right or even behind what you want in front so I used a mask cut out using black tape roughly the same size as the fire atom at the front and placed it over the image of a few laser beams and rotated the shot twice (180 degrees).

Finally a Zoom Pull
I then exposured a shot of a PCB and and a star field that I zoomed pulled, then an image of some smoke then finally exposed the image of the fire atom and done, though it did take lots of goes to get the alignment right and the exposure too.

Check out a few of the set up shots Mart shared of a recent shoot he did using similar techniques to create another WOW image seen below and for even more beautiful masterpieces check out Marts Flick Profile HERE: