SADDLE TIME

Started light painting recently. Now I can’t enough. The possibilities are endless and putting the whole thing together is a real buzz.

Anyway this is a 10-shot blend. The subject was set up at dusk when I made the first exposures for the sky. I experimented a bit with these in Adobe Camera Raw – using the tungsten setting for example, to accentuate the blue - then switched to CS5 and used a Curves layer in Overlay mode for contrast.

When it was completely dark, each part of the picture was lit and exposed separately and blended one at a time. It’s possible to stack the files into Photoshop layers from Bridge, and I sometimes do that, but in this case it was easier to work with two files at a time than 10.

Details: 5D2, 24-105L, ISO160. Each exposure was 15 seconds at f14. The subject was lit with an LED Lenser torch ($A145), secured at the end of a painter’s pole so I could light from above.