Photography in its purest form is made up of light and a light-tight box with a photo-sensitive backing and preferably a lens at the other end. This is something that has not changed since an Englishman Henry Fox Talbot had a breakthrough in 1835  (although Frenchman Nicéphore Niépce achieved rough examples in 1826). So needless to say all you need is to open the camera’s shutter to expose it to light and voila you have likely created a picture. 

Okay, it is a bit more complicated than that but with some knowledge and patience, you can achieve beautiful and unique results. With this in mind when I discovered that you could paint with light this many years ago in high school my old Canon AE1 camera it blew my mind. The effect can be almost otherworldly. 

It basically goes like this. You have whatever you want to shoot and pre-focus on them with your camera that is on a tripod. Then make the room or area quite dark. With a flashlight in hand, you open the shutter of the camera and start painting in the areas you want lit. If you light it the camera sees it and if it is not lit it is not recorded. Exposure is determined by the typical exposure triangle which consists of three variables that adjust how a camera captures light: aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. The exception is that the light intensity and duration is to predominate factor.

It’s so unpredictably organic in the experience but very satisfying once you see the vision realized. I love that it is a tenuous process that challenges me to keep up with what’s been exposed to the light and how long to create the desired effect. One of the advantages is that the light can seem to come from anywhere and the light can fill in its own shadows as it goes across the area. It’s something to can be perfected with patience and experience. 

The photographs here are examples.  The bourbon is a recent example of this process for Pardi Batch 112 and the SG guitar  I shot on film in 2007 as Gibson Guitar banners to go in the L’Olympia theater in Paris France.