What a great night shooting Noir!!  Pictures are on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/pg/danchickphotography/photos/?tab=album&album_id=1485397598198984 and prints and high resolution downloads are available at https://danchick.smugmug.com/Fantastic-Hosts-Noir-Party-2017/

Thanks for making such visual magic with me! 

As I have been writing tutorials for light painting I made the decision to dedicate my fledgling site entirely to my light painting endeavors.  It's all of the art that I've been doing but I had to decide whether I wanted that woven in permanently to this site or not.  HackTheLight.com will now be where all of my light painting stuff lives.  My galleries and blog posts have all been ported over and right after this blog post is made I will start removing that content from this site.  I'll leave some placeholders to point people over there but that's about it.

Downsides: existing links may break.  That's about it.  I don't have enough of a following that this will be any kind of issue.

Upside: tutorial links, and my art, will find permanent homes on this new domain even if I want to change up this site.

Today the world lost an artist that moved a lot of people.  Kaitie Amen and I had already planned to shoot tonight and to do a Bowie-inspired lightning stencil.  We came up with three Bowie pieces and then shot three comic pieces that are worth checking out.  As always with all of my work, all light was created and captured in a single long exposure.   Camera Raw was used to balance some levels but otherwise what you see is exactly what we saw on the back of the camera when the shutter closed!

You can buy prints of these pieces here.

View on site

If you made my Skytalks talk in Vegas this past weekend thank you so much!  It was exciting to see so many people running around wearing badges I designed!

I promised links to my presentation.  I have modified it slightly to include some more of what I said while the slides were up.  Download them and check them out!  Powerpoint and Keynote formats.

I shot the Fantasy-themed Ominous event last night.  Here are my two favorites of Rufio and Bree.  See the whole set here, you can purchase prints or download high resolution images of your shots.

I was walking down the First Friday art walk last night and saw an empty gallery with a single table in it.  And then I saw a light painting print on it.  I looked closer and it was David Wilhelm filling in last minute.  He told me to grab my gear and shoot in the basement of the building and after walking around a bit more I did just that.

If I shot with you last night or if you want to see what we came up with in a make-shift shooting environment click the image or visit this link: http://danchick.smugmug.com/First-Friday-July-3-2015/

Feel free to grab the preview versions on the site but please leave my photo credit on there.  If you want to download a high resolution version of an image click the green "Buy Photos" link and then selects "Downloads".

A couple days ago I got a chance to shoot an old friend, Carre Callaway, when she was in town with her band, Queen Kwong.  I got some conventional shots and I tried to mix in some 'found light' light painting.  And by that I mean using whatever lights were at the venue with whatever angles I could get without being disruptive to the show.  Three bands, three new galleries.  Check out Montoneros, The Savage Blush, and Queen Kwong!

Thanks to the team that assembled quickly last night to help me pull off this image!  This image celebrates the court decision that welcomes in marriage equality to the United States.  The name of the piece is “Love Wins (Obergefell v. Hodges)”.  All proceeds from print sales of this piece will be donated to LGBT causes.  Click on the image to view the image page and the green Buy Print link at the top.

Here are the tools used to create this shot:

 Last night I had the chance to shoot a fun shot for the Skytalks 2015 artwork.  303 coughed up contributors such as Mar (model), Night Music (Marc, Erin, Chad, Don doing pyrotechnics) with addtional assistants/watchers (Tilver, chance, Bert, BK, Feedle, Cass) and a videographer friend (David Quakenbush).  We also had four firefighters and one fire marshall supervising.

First order of business was Night Music experimenting with various forms of explosives.  They hadn't shot indoors before and we got to shoot this at a firefighters training burn house!  I didn't get great shots of this stage because nobody was allowed in the building, lest it crumble and fall on our heads in a tragic moment. After we deemed it safe to enter we took some more test shots inside.

One of my goals was to see if I could do this using the in-camera multiple exposure feature.  I actually built a second physical shutter I could attach to the end of my lens but the sizes didn't match and it created a sort of tunnel-vision that would have required me to be farther back from the shot than I'd have the luxury of doing in an enclosed building.  

So we tried the multiple exposures.  I drew the letters in the air using a Pixelstick and lit Mar with a flashlight.  Night Music set of charges in the background.  While the multiple exposure technique was close it didn't end up being the best we'd get.  After doing a set of shots with the firemen we shot another round with Mar, this time capturing individual light elements that I'd assemble in post-processing.  We got the best flame, the best body position, the best Pixelstick lettering.

So despite this not being my normal light painting way.... I present for your enjoyment this year's Skytalks 2015 artwork.  

CLICK HERE FOR LARGER VERSION

When I first started light painting in serious way I shot with a photographer friend and his wife and they invited Mary along to our shoot.  We were all learning and it was an exciting day. I haven't really seen much of her in the past year but we got to shoot the other night and it was exciting to see how far my craft has progressed in a year.  Here's my fave from our set: