Hi! My Picture Day: my first contest post

Hey there.

I'm a professional photographer and I just found out about Steemit, and uh, THIS PLACE ROCKS. I recently stumbled across the MyPictureDay photo challenge and wanted to play along. Here are 3 of my favorite images from a classic American muse: Joshua Tree National Park near 29 Palms, California.

Scroll down to see how I took the light trails :)
I really hope you enjoy my work and you should check the challenge out yourself!

No, it's not photoshop! It's a simple technique called light painting. In early photography, 400ISO film had to be exposed to light for 1-2 minutes in order to properly expose the image; if you look closely at vintage photos (pre-1920s or so), clouds, moving water and walking pedestrians all have an ethereal blurriness to them. Today, cameras are much sharper. We can take photos in broad daylight at 400ISO at just hundredths of a second!

Buuut, if you want to play around with those concepts, you can create some pretty cool images due to the warping of movement in long exposures.

These images are all one single image with no layers or photoshop magic. Just some choreographed long exposures with the help of my 4 good friends.

Here's the break down:

1. Place camera on tripod with Speedlite mounted on the hot-shoe (2nd curtain flash, that's very important!!)
2. Put camera on a 25+ second exposure, exposing for the background
3. Line up your friends and tell them to stay as still as possible in their poses until they see the flash fire
4. Run around like an idiot using a very bright LED light to "paint" light into the foreground, background and subjects to desired final effect.

It takes a few tries, but the results are always so impressive and you'll have a lot of fun doing it!

Ciao,

Mariah