While doing a little spring cleaning in the equipment store for the new year, we ran across an old light painting system we used to use quite often, especially in the analogue days of the 90’s.
For a while back then, the light painting effect was all the rage with professional photographers.
We couldn’t ignore the urge to haul it back into the studio to put it through it’s paces just for interest’s sake.
As we set it all up, all the memories of the time spent using it came flooding back.
Light painting is basically a technique in photography where the camera is set up and locked off on a camera stand or tripod and then with the studio in darkness, the shutter is left open while the subject is “painted” with a moving light source. This creates the image by building up the exposure as the painting progresses.
The equipment we have is the Hosemaster system which was developed in the 90’s by a photographer from New Mexico named Aaron Jones who was quite famous in those days for his light painting photography.
The system is quite sophisticated. It consists of a control box with the light source, a powerful arc or daylight discharge lamp, coupled through an aperture system to a long fibre optic flexible hose (hence the name). The fibre optic terminates in a coupling unit that hosts a plethora of different light shaping masks and tools. These include simple shaped masks, molded attachments with varying size and shape holes, light wands, smaller scraper type paddles and small, solid glass probes with shaped tips for very fine work.
Another important part of the system is the external shutter and filter mechanism. This is set up in front of the camera lens, but to eliminate vibrations, supported independently. This unit allows the photographer to open and close the shutter and flip a diffusion filter in front of the lens by using buttons built into the business end of the fibre optic cable. This allows complete control of the exposure and more importantly, to do a small practice run on each painting movement before applying the exposure to the camera.
The technique gives quite unusual results compared to conventional lighting as the subject is lit not only with moving light, but often with the light source originating from within the area of the photograph, which in conventional real time photography would be impossible.
The other unique effect that it allows is the controlled diffusion of certain selected areas of the image. These areas can be given a clean hard look with no diffusion filter, a very diffuse look with the filter in place and then anywhere in between by giving different proportions of exposure with and without the filter in.
We shot a couple of different simple setups just for the fun of it, but we’re now rethinking it’s use in our day to day commercial photography, especially when it comes to smaller industrial equipment which we sometimes need to photograph in the studio. It could give us the ability to do something different and unique especially with smaller subjects and is well worth keeping in mind.
Below is a link to the website of Aaron Jones who later went on to create commercials using his light painting system and techniques.