Light-painting in the Michigan Sky

“Night time is really the best time to work. All the ideas are there to be yours because everyone else is asleep.”-Catherine O’Hara

I’ve been dying to try to photograph the amazing night time sky after my trip over to the West coast I blogged about a couple of months ago. This summer I had a couple of opportunities to study the sky over a couple of parts of the county that are known for their lack of light pollution. This of course helps creating a deep dark and high contrast background for those amazing specs of distant light.

I have also been looking forward to attempting a little light painting as I have watched a few entertaining classes by Dave Black recently as well as Ben Wilmore on this topic. There are many ways to add a little light into a scene, but one is to “paint” a few lumens in with a flashlight….and in this case, a pretty high powered one!

The image below is one that I got to play a bit with both of those techniques. In order to get this shot, I held the shutter open for about 30 seconds at f2.8 / ISO 1600 (or higher possibly) while a painted on a few details into the leaves and pranches that are reaching into the deep dark sky. I then opened up some of the shadows with lightroom to create the final image!

As I had mentioned above, Ben Wilmore has a few classes out there on light painting. In fact I did a little video about his class a while ago. Thought you might enjoy checking it out below!

As always, more on ALL of this later!

For those reading this in an RSS feed or email. here is a link to the video above!