Another bit of flat art I’m photographing. These are two framed pieces hanging in my parent’s condo in Colorado. My brother painted them I think around 93 or 94, might have been earlier. I really like them, but I hadn’t gotten a chance to document them. Spending a week in the condo gave me the opportunity to do so.

I’m traveling light this trip– two lenses, one body, and one little shoemount flash. The ideal to shoot this with a couple of studio lights, softboxes to either side, and modeling lights so I could figure out where the reflections were.

So I shot it in complete darkness– not complete darkness, one light in the kitchen was on so I didn’t trip over everything. The camera was on bulb, which means that the first trigger from the remote opens the shutter, the second trigger closes the shutter. Tests with my camera have shown me that up to around 30 seconds, you can’t see any noise at ISO 200, so I had up to about 30 seconds to pull this off.

I did a test shot to establish exposure– which was about 1/2 power on the flash. It looked pretty good so I dropped the exposure to 1/8 power and planned on doing 4 pops to get back to the 1/2 power exposure. A few tries later (shadow of a lampshade was a problem on one try) I had this lovely image– with a white background and lots of shadows. I clipped out the background, replaced it with black, and thusly: a nice copy.

You can’t light painting like this face-on– they usually have enough sheen to them that they bounce a lot of the light back at you. You have to hit them with light so the glare from the flash bounces away from the lens– doesn’t have to be much, and with a modeling light you can see the glare and make sure its off the camera.

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