Lightpainting | Digital Mastery: The home of everything Ben

Lightpainting & Vintage Things

Posted by admin in Blog on June 10, 2013

Two of my favorite topics! This week, I combined the two by lightpainting a vintage truck I had visited a few weeks ago. This truck is located at the Antique Powerland Museum in Salem, Oregon. The museum is full of vintage semis and other vehicles, and back when Karen and I got a tour, I spoke with our guide about returning one night to lightpaint my favorite vehicle. After seeing my work, the guide agreed to meet me after dark one night.

The vehicle is a 1938 Ford COE (cab-over-engine) that has a whopping 85 horsepower (my vintage bus has more like 400 for comparison). It was the first Ford truck to use the COE design. I just love the art deco/streamline moderne design of trucks of that vintage.

If you’re a photographer or photo enthusiast, know that there are only three things preventing you from making an image like this one: 1) time, 2) patience, 3) technical knowledge. I can only help you with #3. If you want to get started painting with light, check out my e-book on the subject. You can even download a free starter/sample pdf to get you started.

This is one of my mega light paintings… I shot no fewer than 120 exposures! But some of those where as short as one second long just to light the hood ornament for example. When it’s a big and complex object like this one, I tend to be excessive with the number of exposures I capture… if I miss something, it’s going to be just a black hole… so I better light be sure to light everything… and often from more then one angle. My main complaint about this image is the lack of shape in the near front fender. The far front fender is lit from light reflecting off the white wall next to the truck. If I were to do it again, I would have lit the ceiling to get some light to reflect into the near front fender.

While I was in the Salem area, I toured Gordon house, which is one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s usonian homes. I’ve always been a Frank Lloyd Wright fan, and whenever I’m near one of his buildings, I try to pay a visit.

Outside of lightpainting, I spent a good part of the week between Portland and Eugene, Oregon. My vintage bus is located in Eugene and the progress on the interior has been really consistent. Up until now, the interior of the bus has been a “mockup,” meaning a temporary interior that we would constantly tweak until we liked how everything was set up. Well, we finally got everything how we wanted it, so the mockup was pulled out, and progress has begun with the true materials. The guys started building our cabinets, and we completed the plans for the entryway design. If you’d like to follow the progress of the bus, I post everything on the Creative Cruiser’s Facebook Page.

The constantly-changing blueprint for my vintage bus.

This coming week, I’m heading to Seattle to teach the next segment in my Photoshop Mastery series on creativeLIVE. This class is on retouching and collage, and it’s free to watch while it’s live! Of course, if you like what you see, you can purchase the class for a discounted rate while it’s live. The class is Monday and Tuesday, 9 am – 4 pm PST. Check it out HERE.

More to come!

creativeLIVE & more upcoming training events!

Posted by admin in Blog on January 22, 2013

Many thanks to the creativeLIVE team for snapping this photo of me on set.

Hi gang! I just got back from Seattle, where I had an excellent time teaching two online courses at creativeLIVE. I taught a 3-day course on Lightroom Mastery and a 1-day class on Photoshop Mastery: Advanced Masking. If you’re not familiar with creativeLIVE, I highly recommend checking them out. They broadcast live training almost every day, and while its live, it’s completely free to watch. If you decide you like the class, you can purchase it to either stream or download the videos to watch at your convenience. You also must purchase the class in order to get all the course materials. Folks who purchase my Lightroom and Masking classes actually receive a special bonus, because as I was teaching, Karen was following along, creating comprehensive handbooks to go with each class. The Masking handbook is 18 pages long and the Lightroom handbook is 50 pages long!

For more information on the classes or to purchases a course, check out the links below:

Lightroom Mastery

Photoshop Mastery: Advanced Masking

While we were up in Seattle, we got to meet up with my friend Erica Gamet, who also happened to be in town teaching classes at creativeLIVE! Her iBooks Author and InDesign classes were broadcast on the days following my courses. It was nice to be able to catch up with her in such a fun environment.

Me, Karen and Erica hang out after my creativeLIVE classes wrap up.

New Seminar Tour!

And now for some more training news. I’m happy to announce the launch of my new seminar tour, Photographic Artistry with Adobe Photoshop! This will be a full day seminar packed with Photoshop techniques designed to give your photos a creative edge. You’ll learn how to transform a collection of ordinary photographs into seamless, stunning composites. Learn how to remove difficult objects from complex backgrounds, add dimension and depth to your 2D images, master 3D photographic effects, discover the power of Photoshop’s Blending modes, and so much more.

The first two tour dates are March 19 in New York, NY and March 20 in Washington DC. For more information check out the seminar page HERE.

Mastering HDR & Lightpainting

Finally, while we’re on the training topic, there’s still room in my 5-day workshop on HDR & Lightpainting, coming up March 11-15. This will be an intense double feature of a workshop, covering two of my favorite photographic techniques. Once you feel comfortable with those two specialties, then you’ll be able to expand your shooting range beyond the standard golden hour and capture idealized images regardless of what time of day you encounter an interesting subject. This event is being held by the Light Workshops in Los Osos, CA. The gang at Light is great to work with, and students always receive hands-on, one-on-one instruction during these training events. For more information or to register, click HERE.

That’s it for now, everyone. During the next week, we’ll be hanging out in the Eugene, OR area nailing down the layout for the interior of my vintage bus. The shop that’s working on it is making progress every day now. If you’d like to follow the updates, check out the Creative Cruiser Facebook page HERE. More to come…

More lightpainting & happy holidays!

Posted by admin in Blog on December 24, 2012

Hi Gang! I’m writing this post from New Jersey, where I’ll be spending the holiday week with Karen’s family. We started off the week in Eugene, Oregon, where my vintage bus is having its interior worked on. Before we left, I spent some time chatting with the gang at Paradise Coach, making plans for the beginning of the project. Paradise Coach has just finished a 2-year restoration of a 1947 Silverside bus. I did a lightpainting of that bus, which I included in last week’s post. Karen and I also created a video tour of that bus, so if you want to see the kind of work this shop does, check out the video below. The Silverside is a brand of bus I really love and considered buying back when I was in the market for a vintage bus.

On Wednesday, we flew out of Portland and made an overnight stop in Las Vegas before continuing to New Jersey. We stayed with my great friends Steve and Beverly and stayed up into the wee hours catching up with them. In the morning we boarded our flight to Philadelphia and later arrived at Karen’s parents’ house, where the holiday festivities were in full swing. The family has been spending a lot of time preparing for the holidays, and the next couple days should be great.

Karen’s gingerbread house. She and her sister make these every year.

I also got to do another lightpainting shoot in NJ. Our friend Carl, dubbed the “Wine Wizard,” is one of the winemakers at Heritage Vineyards and has an incredible wine cellar of his own. In the past, Karen and I have had the privilege of attending one of his incredible cellar wine dinners, where he shared some of the most amazing wine we had ever tasted. Carl will be moving back to Texas soon, and we wanted to photograph his wine cellar for him, as a nice memory he could take with him to his new house. I spent about an hour and half lightpainting the cellar, and it proved to be one of my more challenging lightpaints because of how reflective the bottles are, and because many of them had to be back-lit to make sure they showed up properly. You can see the image below. The entire shot was lit with only the red ribbon light that’s found on the top of the cellar rack and a LED Lenser P5R Flashlight, which is my favorite small lighting instrument.

This one was rather crazy since it’s the combination of no fewer than 160 shots. It was very difficult to light in such a small room with bottles that look black if you don’t either back-light the whites or side light the reds. Just imagine trying to stand somewhere inside to light an area without having your body in the shot.

The final lightpaint. This image is made up of no fewer than 160 shots. Click on the image to enlarge it.

Karen’s shot of me shooting. Of course, when I was ACTUALLY lightpainting, it was pitch black in the room.

If you’re interested in this type of photography, you can learn to lightpaint with my 94-page e-book, The Fine Art of Painting With Light. It’s only $9.97 and you can get it HERE. If you prefer to learn hands-on, I’ve got a workshop coming up in March called “Mastering HDR & Lightpainting.” You can learn more about that event and register HERE.