Painting with Light

After completing the lab for this assignment, I was really excited to go out and try it on my own with my group (Preston Guerra, Christina Manolis, and Lillian Kelly.) We went out to a farm in Millersburg around fifteen minutes away from Columbia and were able to shoot a big tractor as well as massive bails of hay. We got there a little before 8pm, and it was surprisingly warm compared to the weather we have been having. The sky was pretty clear too, which was nice for our photos. We started working with the tractor at first and did a lot of different stuff with gels and strobes. Below is our select for this assignment.

After being run over and chopped up by a tractor one stormy night in 1832, the young girl's ghost returns every dark and stormy night to seek her revenge on anyone who crosses her path. Many people have ventured out to this farm to see if the story is really true. Nobody has ever heard from any of them again.

We shot this with an ISO of 200, at an aperture of f/8.0 on the bulb setting with a 50mm lens. We really liked this photo because of the ghost that is sitting on the tractor. I was lucky enough to be the ghost in all of our takes and it was really fun! I used a small flash to light myself up on the tractor after all of the other lights were painted onto the tractor. I really like how we lowered the tripod down so that the camera is almost looking up at the tractor. This makes it look like the tractor is coming towards the camera. It looks really scary when the camera is on this level. I also like the colors that we used, especially the red for the tractor. Looking back on it the one thing I would have liked to have done would be to add another flash to the seat of the tractor when I wasn't sitting there so it would add more of a transparent look to the ghost. All in all, I had a really fun time with this assignment. Our group also worked extremely well together and we were able to come up with a lot of neat frames. It was hard to choose just one for this assignment! This has been my favorite assignment in Advanced Techniques so far and I'm really proud of the work we produced.

Here are some more frames that we produced.