#lightwriting

“acolorcollective.”

Photography by Joshua White

You've probably noticed this photo on my blog as a banner here and wondered "Gee, where did she get such a fabulous photo?"

Funny thing about that: I made it!

What you are looking at took well over a hundred tries and spending about 2 hours in total darkness to get right so if you look at this and think, "Oh! This looks pretty easy!"

Guess again.

The process to create the photo seen here involved a high ISO, a 30 second long shutter, and a very wide aperture/F-Stop, and then with 3 glowsticks in hand, tapping the camera button to open the shutter, then running out in front of the camera at a very specific spot and pose to write out the word, "FIRE" in the air, in cursive, backwards, before the shutter closes at 30 seconds. You cannot see how well you're writing, how lined up or severely askewed your light-path is until you check back to look at the photo once the shutter closes. Again, this took me over a hundred tries and 2 hours before I came up with a photo I liked. Then I took it into a photo-developing program called RawTherapee, a awesomely free alternative to Lightroom, and did some lighting and coloration adjustments to rid of some fuzz and help bring out some of the color that was otherwise looking pallid.

I plan to do more in the future.....when I'm not sick.