Paint Me A Picture

I don’t know why, but lately I’ve been on a light painting kick.

It started about a month ago with the aqueduct in Roanoke Rapids and now it’s moved on to the Pisgah Covered Bridge outside of Asheboro, NC.

The bridge was built in 1911 over the west fork of the Little River. In 2003, the bridge was washed away by a flood. It was rebuilt a year later using a majority of the original materials.

Traffic no longer crosses the bridge. A new two-lane bridge was built in the 1950’s and the Pisgah Covered Bridge soon became a tourist attraction. It joined other landmarks when it was added the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.

I got to the bridge a little before sunset. Another photographer showed up while I was getting ready. She was doing High Dynamic Range photos of the bridge and soon went on her way before the sun started to go down.

Meanwhile, I was setting up and getting all my gear in order.

I placed a couple of strobes with double CTO gels on them in the center of the bridge and used a snooted strobe and a spotlight to illuminate the outside.

I did an exposure test with just the strobes firing to get a ballpark idea of my f-stop. It ended up at 5.6 at ISO 200.

The exposure for the final picture I took that night was 424 seconds at 5.6 at ISO 100. That’s four seconds over seven minutes. Just enough time to run around blasting light and listening for traffic.

Each time a car would pass, I had to cover the lens with my hand or I’d have a light streak running through the frame. Sometimes I was 10 feet from the camera and heard the cars coming. And sometimes I was on the other side of the bridge and had to make a mad dash in the dark to get to the camera.

Sometimes I made it. And sometimes I didn’t. But nearly every time, I almost killed myself trying to make it to the camera in the dark.

Luckily, I was in the middle of nowhere and could hear a car coming from about half a mile away. I swear, by the end of the night, I could tell the difference between a Ford and Chevy.

The best part (or worst part, depending on how you see it) about light painting is that each picture you create with light painting is unique. There are never two pictures exactly the same.