Blue

Hello and Happy Monday!

This week I'm bringing you some wonderful light painting images taken by Dave Edkins at ARB studio last month just before my birthday. We often muck about with light painting when we are in the studio because you can get really creative with it, and you never really know what you're going to get. It’s fun.

We always try something new and come away with some fantastic images at the end of it which is great. We often forget to revisit ideas though because we get carried away with new ones every time.

Before I share the images with you, here are Dave's links: Instagram, Threads, PurplePort and E-photozine. The images in this post were shot on his Nikon D850 and were edited by me.

Blue

Before we played around with some light painting, we did a few classic art nudes to test the lighting. Obviously we nailed them because it’s what we are best at. We were using a blue gel on the light for all of the shots in this blog post (hence, the name) and I'll tell you why shortly. But anyway, here are some nice, low-key, classic art nude shots from before we went into the weird and abstract world of light painting.

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The reason we were using a blue gel was because of this image:

I sent this photo to Dave the afternoon before the shoot, saying something along the lines of 'we have a problem'. I'd been doing some activities with Pixie that involved a bingo marker. You know, the kind that is basically just all ink inside... yeah one of those. Anyway, she asked me to open it for her and I pulled at the lid instead of twisting it. It went everywhere. Not only did it take forever to clean up, the marker was ruined, and so were my hands. There were also splashes of it randomly on my stomach and legs too. And all over my sofa. Oops.

That image was after I'd spent a significant amount of time scrubbing and trying out all of the home remedies to removing ink from skin. Thankfully, it had faded considerably by the next morning (the thing that helped the most was actually doing the dishes that evening... housework for the win!) but we still went with a blue gel anyway to try to hide any remaining ink stains on my body... and the images did look really really nice with that colour to them.

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Circles

On to some of the light painting... I managed to get some really really good circles and I'm quite proud of them. Like, I don't think I could draw a circle this good on paper, but apparently it's a lot easier to draw with a torch on a long exposure photograph.

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The circles on this last one are my favourite because it looks more like two complete circles, rather than a sort of loop:

Spirals

After we nailed a few shots of the circles, I had a go at a spiral. It's harder than you'd think not to make the circles too small too quickly! I also have a very poor concept of time so long exposure shots are interesting to shoot with me.

Here are a couple more of the spirally shots that I quite liked while I was wearing a dress. I had a play around with the colour when editing these shots to see what kind of vibe you get with something other than blue (since blue was only chosen to disguise the blue ink incident!)

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Squiggles

Some general messing about is always necessary on any shoot, but especially so when light painting. The first image was me panicking and randomly drawing lots of squiggly lines, and the second one doesn't have much light painted on it, so I'd assume that was one of the shots where my brain just sort of froze and I didn't know what to do! These shots ended up looking quite good despite not feeling it at the time.

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Shimmer

After we had worn ourselves out with the torch, we tried a few other things to see what effects we could get. The most successful was shining a light through a crystal bracelet in front of the lens after the flash had gone off on a long exposure. It created some really interesting and highly varied results. I loved it. And this one relied on Dave to get right rather than me, so I'm always up for it being someone else's problem if it goes wrong.

First up, here are two images where the effect was a lot more subtle and it just adds a nice bit of something extra to the art nude image:

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And next are a couple of photographs where the shimmer effect was a lot more of a feature in the final image... I particularly like the second image where one of the bits of light reflected is across my face. Usually that would annoy me, but I think the randomness works here, especially as the rest of the shimmer effect frames the body really nicely.

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Fire

Just before I sign off, I'd like to share with you the thing I did with the torch that was my absolute favourite of the day: FIRE. We only did one shot of that and it didn't need another shot because I just nailed it. Then when editing, I added a slightly different hue to the edit to make a tryptic. But yeah, I was really pleased when I saw this on the back of the camera (and Dave looked really confused as to what I was doing until the image came up)

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Misuzu

And then as an outtake, here is me trying to write my name. It's so hard trying to write your name backwards... especially if it has an 's' and a 'z' in it. I did two tries and you can kinda see what it's supposed to say... kinda...

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Then I wrote Pixie's name and realised that I can use my hand to cover the torch in between letters so it looked (more) like the word it was supposed to. Now I know for next time. At least I got the important one right!

Thanks for taking the time to look at these images today. I hope you have a beautiful week and I look forward to sharing more with you next Monday :)

Misuzu x