Light Painting Photography Contest Winner – March 2021

The winner for the Light Painting Photography Flower Themed Contest is… Ivan Lucio and Javier Jimenez a.k.a. Riders of Light for the wonderful image above.  Ivan provided a great look at all the steps that it took to create this winning image, check out the write up below!

By Ivan Lucio: Until today we had not shown any photograph of the making of this work. I think it’s a good time to show the amount of time it takes to get to a result like this. We did this session with our friends Dario Cuesta and Miguel Gomez, the inspiration came from the spectacular location. It is a country house that although it was not in use, it was not abandoned, so we were lucky to get permission from the owner to go to take our photographs there. We wanted to create a light plant because the house reminded us of a mushroom and it seemed to us that it could integrate very well some type of light flower in front of this beautiful house. We only had to start designing our light plant, we did not have anything clear what its shape would be. We knew the colors we wanted to use, green to match the mushroom house and a pink to give it a good contrast, so it was time to start to practice the branches and see how the light strokes worked. Here are a few of our first practice shots.

We decided to combine 2 different flashlight modes that we thought could be make the image much better. We used a continuous light and strobe light, the flashlight used was the Klarus RS11, it has these 2 modes with separate buttons.   The tools to paint the plant were 2 plexiglass rod with its adapter and some round methacrylate filters.

The camera we used was an Olympus OMD EM1 Mark II, with a 7mm wide-angle lens, all the tests were done with a very short exposure time so as not to waste a lot of time since it was very cold, as you can see the sky is totally dark in these first tests for that reason.

You can see photo after photo we tried to improve the type of trace, we were discarding some things and adding others. Seeing that we were already liking how the plant was looking we began to test the lighting of the house little by little. We keep trying new ways!

  We decided to include in the ground some points of light in the shape of a triangle, when we tried and we liked it a lot. We made these points of light with some boxes of colored LEDs that we placed well placed on the ground. Below is a photograph of this tool that we use a lot when we need fixed continuous light. At this point in the tests, perhaps 2 hours had passed, many times people do not know the work behind creating a single image! Remember that it was also very cold and there were  more and more tests that we did that you don’t see here. We also tried to see if we could include some sparkles but we didn’t like it so we discarded that idea.

While we were testing the exposure for the sky we found an incredible surprise that we had not planned! The polar star was just above the house!!! WOW! We found that we could have a beautiful photograph with a star trail around the house, we had not planned this and but we could not let the idea escape! This was the last test before launching into the final photograph, as you can see, all the lines are already in order and the mushroom house masterfully illuminated by Dario, with the Fenix FD41 flashlight. At this point, it was time to configure the camera, the settings that we used were:
Live Composite Mode
F 5,6
ISO 500
Exposure Time 60”

To draw with light, after creating the plant and giving light to the house we let the live composite mode work, that is, it creates many photos of 60 “each, I think I remember that the final time of the photograph was about 30 minutes.

We hope you liked this work and that it inspires you to create your light plants, which do not have to be so complex, you can do very beautiful things like these others

You can follow us on these pages and social networks:  IG @riders_of_Light    web : Ridersoflight.com  IG @ivan_lucio_Light_Painting   web: Ivanlucio.es

For this winning image The Riders of Light will receive a prize package filled with light painting tools and treasures from our sponsors COAST Flashlights, Rosco 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.