Adventure, Blue Ridge Parkway, Experimentation, Hiking, Light Painting, Travel

I started out in life as a film photographer. I STILL shoot film on occasion. Film photography forces you to analyze light within an image in detail both in the field and in the darkroom. Last Saturday while at Linville Wilderness Gorge, we decided to play with light as you might do in a darkroom when you dodge and burn your image and use light actively within the frame to make a print. I can’t go any further though without giving credit to my fellow photographer Jesse Roberts. Lots of these images were his creative direction!

We decided to play with our headlamps, a multi-colored light up frisbee and sparklers to create different effects. Here are some of the highlights, but you can view the whole gallery here.

Jason loved painting himself into multiple parts of the frame for an effect we called “ghosting”.

This is what happens when you ask an eight-year-old to paint with light. <3

Here is our tri-colored frisbee…

After a while, we hipped up to the idea of working together within the frame. The resulting dragon was Jesse’s idea…

Butterfly or praying mantis?

And then the sparklers happened…

The path of the ninja.

Being a wedding photographer, I had Jesse and Megan pose for me.

Fiery Angels.

Jason painted a tree with light, but he got caught in the frame in this shot and I rather liked the effect.

At this point, things got very cool as we started to treat the light in the frame as “energy” and this happened:

And then a little superhero/Marvel action:

We had so much fun with this experiment. Light painting really pushed my creativity and made me conceptualize an idea before executing. Thanks again to Jesse Roberts, Megan Phares Roberts and Jason Kubota for being subjects, photographers and creators!