September 7th, 2008 by scott | Posted in Photography | 3 Comments »
Sometimes you’ve got to try some new things, just have some fun and not worry so much about the results… just enjoy the process of making pictures. So lately I’ve been playing around with a couple of techniques I’ve been wanting to try for a while. First I experimented with making some photo composites - this is more of a Photoshop technique than a photographic one, although some thought needs to go into the initial photo(s). Basically, you take a few photos of the same scene (with your camera on a tripod) but in each photo you change some element, and then you can paste them all together in Photoshop. When I’m in “experiment mode” I tend to do a lot of self-portraits, since I can be pretty certain that my model won’t get bored before I do. The photo composite lends itself very well to the self-portrait - some people have really taken this idea and run with it - creating some really impressive work. My first take was significantly more humble, but it was fun to do.
The other thing I’ve been wanting to try more of is “light painting.” This also involves a tripod (which is good, since mine has been neglected lately) - you go out in the dark, put your camera on the tripod, and then “paint” with a lightsource - I used a 2.5 million candlepower flashlight, and a flash. You can either aim the light directly at the camera, in which case you get some really cool lines running through the photo, tracing the motion of the light, or you can shine the light on something and if it’s bright enough and the exposure is long enough, the things in the photo will start to show up. I did both… some amazing art has come out of this technique, but my efforts were considerably more humble, and actually kind of boring… but it was fun staying out until midnight popping off flashes and playing with a big flashlight. For the first one, I “painted” the trees with my super bright flashlight, during a period of about 90 seconds, then I put my headlamp on and ran up and down the path, creating the zig-zagging white line. For the second, I painted the tree with the flashlight, and then stood in front of it and popped off a single flash pointed at me, so it looks like I’m “in” the tree…
And finally, my favorite of the recent experiments. After taking pictures of Bevin on her bike, I thought it would be fun to try a different style of cycling photos. I bought a device called a “Bogen magic arm” which allows you to clamp your camera to an object. I clamped mine to the handlebars of my bike, with a wide-angle lens pointing backwards towards the bike. This made for some really fun self-portraits, and as an added bonus I got to enjoy all the strange looks I got while riding around with this contraption on my bike. I’m really happy with the results on these, and I definitely intend to play around with this some more… probably adding some more interesting lighting, but I might need some help for that - there’s only so far you can go with a self-portrait when you have to aim the camera, fire the camera and steer the bike at the same time (oh yeah, and make goofy faces).
I shot with Vince before in Old Sacramento (I’ll post a few of those images first since for some reason I never blogged them), and we wanted to do another shoot under more controlled conditions - Vince ended up with lots of splinters and some glass in his forehead after two hours of break dancing in the wilds of Old Sacramento! 
