Looking back in time, at images created during the first few years of my discovery and practice of this amazing creative art form. It's easy to be critical about those basic images but it can be a valuable reflection which helps me to appreciate how much time and effort has been spent and how my skills may have developed over the last 10 years.
LACE Light Writing
A relatively simple task of writing my name with a finger light. However it took me at least 10 attempts with many of the images showing that I had gone out of frame (in fact this final image was cropped so the writing appeared more central) One of the main aspects I learned during this process was that a marker on the floor would have made the lining-up a lot more consistent, and that using your body as a measuring tool can also minimize out-of-frame mistakes.
Structures to Guide You
The above walkway stretches over the reed beds in Poole Harbour and was a helpful way to discover creating symmetry with repeating patterns and leading lines. Using the railings to guide my light tools was very useful in showing me that without a steady hand it would be hard to create smooth lines with the LED tools and that it was going to take a lot of attempts to get it right.
Wafting Through the Scene
Many attempts at the same design, repeating and repeating until it was as good as I could do at the time, or I became bored and gave up. My light orbs/spheres definitely improved after this time but still today remain a challenge to achieve the perfect spin.
Mastersphere in the Back Garden
All of the tools I used during this initial period were all home made as I didn't know if there was any way to purchase LP tools in 2014-15 and I wouldn't know what they were called anyway. Apart from a crate-load of torches, including V2 of Ryu's lightworks torch and my most used Klarus's XT11S and XT11GT, the only LP tools I have ever bought are the white fibre, the black fibre and the 10mm round fibre optic from Light |Painting Paradise, everything else I made at home, as have many other Light Painters.
Team Lace at the Cordite Factory
One of our few Team LACE shots where we both appear in the shot (see our heads poking out the window). I'm not quite sure what we were planning in this shot but I think we had the idea that the shapes and areas of lighting were in some way connected and like a electronic circuit or a mechanical machine.
WHAT IS LIGHTPAINTING?
