Painting with Light

Qi An

Painting with Light Self Evaluation

   It is more like a game rather than an assignment! I have a happy experience with my partners. Anyway, it is also a difficult one; we have a good idea but we fail to make it as ideal as we imagined.

   Anna has two dancer friends who came to help us. We decided to use flash light to freeze their graceful poses in the air, and use a colored light to draw a ribbon-like line around them. However, it turns out not as perfect as we hoped. Problems we met include:

   Untidy background: we shoot in the studio; the backdrop could not cover enough space and we found a lot of unwanted stuff in the frame. I suggested that letting the dancers jump at same spot but we move camera instead; it might be a better way to put the four figures in appreciate positions in the frame. But others believed it was too difficult to control.

   Insufficient lighting: one flash was only enough to lighten part of the dancer’s body; but two flashes would make it over-exposed. We were trying hard to find a way to well light the dancers without extra light on background, but failed. And since Anna flashed the dancers in front of them, in some pictures we could see her shadow, and we did not find solution. I feel the most difficult part of light painting is how to lighten only what I want while avoid making unwanted stuff appear in the frame.

Some of the images we took: