SAFE!

Today I want to share with you the first part of a series "SAFE!" present. It's a longer story that began in 2019. The idea for the series is actually based on a challenge that my friend
Rodrigo Bari gave me. He suggested taking a light painting with his medium format analog camera (5" x 7") from the 1920s. So I looked for picture ideas in black and white. He traveled from Sao Paulo to Germany at Christmas time. The lighting conditions were therefore favorable for outdoor light painting. First, we started a few experiments with the digital camera to study the motifs, practice light painting processes and, of course, test the tools built for this purpose. So we went into the forest.
The Olympus camera's live composite mode was used when we took the pictures in daylight because I didn't have any decent ND filters at the time. The recordings were subsequently converted to black and white.

We got up very early for this picture above. In the morning we hiked into the forest with the medium format camera and the Nikon plus 2 tripods, some flashlights and my pixel stick. Then we positioned the cameras, set them up and started light painting.
For this I moved through the forest with the pixel stick. As if I were drawing a curtain through the trees. Then I illuminated the trees from the side with an LEDLenser MT14.
The irony of history is that precisely this piece of forest was cut down due to the persistent drought of recent years and infestation by the bark beetle. So the forest only lives on in this picture. Actually sad.

In the image below you can see the tools used. It is a 2 m long Pxelstick with 288 RGB LEDs and the self-built control. This is stowed in the bag during the light painting so that no light from the display penetrates to the outside. I can load any BMP graphic with a height of 288 pixels and any length into the pixel stick. In my case it was just a 288 pixel high white stripe.

To be continued next Sunday. Stay tuned!