Garden Steps

Another session with the Ice Light and a chance to simply practice painting techniques. Although this scene is far from a ‘sweeping landscape’, it’s still a large area to paint and with it comes the challenge of how to visually layer the different elements and bring out the inherent textures. Flooding the scene with light would be quick and easy … but it’s not an approach that would yield anything compelling. Knowing where to apply light and where to retain shadow, important to any photographic technique, involves a learning curve. My approach … do it often / pay attention.

And the ‘Ice Light’ … love it.

Garden Path

I photograph this scene often. A beautiful setting and being right outside our office, it’s very convenient. This time I used it to test a new tool for light-painting, The Ice Light The hand held wand was developed primarily for portrait photography, but it seems perfect for ‘painting’. This thing is about 20″ long, a couple of inches in diameter, and weights a little over a pound. Daylight temperature balance and produces 150 watts worth of light. That’s plenty of output for painting most landscapes and the internal battery will last an hour at full power. The only downside that I found was it’s cost … $500. Still, it packs a lot of light into a very small package. It worked flawlessly for this image. Below is the scene without painting.