I was out the other evening with some friends doing a little paranormal investigation. While they were messing about looking for EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena) with digital recorders and electromagnetic disturbances with a KII meter I was busy with my camera doing some fun photography.
We were at a place called Lydiate Abbey, unsurprisingly located in a village called Lydiate, around 10 miles or so north of the much better known place called Liverpool – that’s the original Liverpool in the UK. The Abbey, however, was not an abbey at all but a ruined chapel dedicated to St. Catherine and this was what I intended to photograph – in the dark. I wanted to create an emotive, slightly spooky looking image and the technique I was going to use was something I’d read about many years ago but had never actually attempted. The technique, as you’ve probably realised from the title is called ‘Painting with Light’. But in the days when I read about this technique, film was King and the results could be very hit and miss simply because you had to wait for development and printing in order to assess the results.
The kind of situation where Painting with Light is a useful technique is when you have a large area to light and you haven’t got loads of studio strobes or the strobes would have to be in the picture. Places like building interiors, especially if the building is poorly lit.
What the technique involves is setting up your camera on a tripod, locking the shutter open on the bulb setting, and then walking round with a hand held flashgun firing off sufficient flashes to illuminate a section of the subject, then moving on and repeating until the whole area has been lit. Being mindful, of course, that you don’t illuminate yourself with the flash, or point the flash directly towards the camera.
The equipment you need to do this successfully is as follows:
A sturdy tripod.
A camera with a ‘bulb’ setting that will accept a remote cable release.
A locking cable release.
A portable flashgun.
My gear consisted of a Canon 40D with 17-85mm EF-S, Canon remote release, my trusty old Benbo Mk I tripod which is very heavy, very solid, and must be getting on for 30 years old. And finally, the most important bit of kit for this exercise my Metz 58 AF-1. The higher the guide number of the flash the easier the job will be because the flashgun will produce more light per burst.
A head torch is a particularly good bit of kit for night time photography. I do a lot of photography in the dark when on these sort of investigations and since the camera needs light to autofocus, shining a light on the subject is essential but very difficult to do with a hand-held torch. Fastened on my head, it’s out of the way of the camera and points directly at whatever the camera is pointing at.
I found myself a suitable location where I could get the angle of the church just the way I wanted it, set the camera up, decided to focus manually using the distance scale on the lens (estimating the distance from camera to subject). This was easier than attempting to obtain and maintain a focus lock for each exposure. It meant I could forget about looking through the viewfinder once the camera was lined up. Then I set the shutter speed to bulb – bulb is a hangover from the days when flashguns actually used bulbs and the bulbs were single use. You opened the shutter, fired the bulb (the light from the bulb making the exposure) and then closed the shutter. On modern cameras the bulb setting is just the same, the shutter remains open as long as you keep your finger pressed down on the shutter release. As soon as you release the shutter button, the shutter closes. This is why you need a locking remote cable release. You have to keep your ‘finger’ on the shutter at the same time you are wandering around with your flashgun. With the remote release I use you can lock the shutter open by pressing the button down and forward.
Right, so shutter open and sensor recording whatever light happens to find its way onto it, I headed for the building, and with the flash set to manual full power fired off one flash between each set of buttresses and the base of the tower and the top of the tower. Headed back to the camera, closed the shutter and checked the results. Disappointing – barely anything registered.
The interesting thing about film and digital sensors is that they are essentially photon counters. Within some limits (this gets us into the territory of Reciprocity Law failure, which is not something we need to get into here) as long as light is hitting the sensor the light is recorded. So it doesn’t matter if all the light needed to make an image arrives in a fraction of a second or arrives over a longer period of time – the effect is cumulative.
So I opened the lens up 2 stops from f16 to f8 and repeated the exercise. Much better. But still a little faint. The building was now visible, but one of my friends had wandered into shot taking photographs while the shutter was open and so I had a series of ‘starbursts’ decorating one area of the image.
I waited until everyone had gone inside the building and increased exposure by another stop by using four flashes at each location instead of two. Much, much better and with the interior of the building nicely illuminated by the photography taking place inside. If I’d been on my own I could have achieved this effect by going inside and firing off a few flashes myself.
Looking at the two images, the ‘spoiled’ one has nicer atmosphere but is just too dark, overall. There was sodium street lighting about 100yds away and this is causing the orange tint and the tree shadows. The final image has the building much better illuminated but the patches of light on the grass are a little too bright. So I used Photoshop to cut out the street light created tree shadows from the first image and pasted them over the bright grass, removed some torches from the left-hand side, toned down the brightest light in the church interior just a touch, and the result is quite acceptable.
You’ll notice that the shutter was open long enough for the stars to register their movement across the heavens and for the moon (hidden just beneath the roof line next to the tower) to considerably lift the sky from the black that it appeared to the eye.
One word of warning, working on uneven ground in the dark is potentially dangerous so watch your step – and remember, black tripod legs in the dark are almost invisible.
