Interacting with the Scene
I see my light painting work as very different from my “straight” night landscapes - leaving traces of my own movement in the photo makes it akin to a performance. I could (and have) made light paintings that were totally detached from the landscape, but more often I come across an object or feature of the landscape that just begs to be interacted with. Take this picnic table. I liked the way my super wide-angle lens made the lines recede, and immediately started thinking of ways to integrate light painting into the shot. My initial idea (above) was to draw a sort of light grid above the table, mimicking the rectangle of the table top.
After taking that shot, I tried to think of other ways to interact with the scene. In the photo above, I used a string of battery-powered LED lights, swinging them in a circle above my head as I walked behind the table. The result was a kind of separation between the foreground and background. Regardless of whether I like the results, I value light painting because it prods me to look at my environment in new ways and think about the interaction between human and landscape.
