Toby Keller - Night Photography Blog

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.

Light Trails Experimentation

I rode waaay out to the far side of Goleta tonight to shoot the full moon. There’s a place there I’ve been meaning to shoot for ages, but it’s kind of a pain to get to with all my gear. It’s a far drive (for Santa Barbara) and then a long walk to these two old piers. Just off the coast are 4 pylons with crossbeams at the top - they look sort of like short telephone poles - and birds roost on top. You can see them on the right side of the photo above. I got some other shots of them, which I’ll blog soon.

At any rate, I tried to push out from my usual style a bit with this one. I really dig the result, and am hoping to keep pushing in 2009. I suppose you could call that my new years resolution.

Light Painting by the Harbor

Long time, no post! I’m a horrible person. That and I’ve been away for the holidays, then sick, then puppy-sitting a manic Viszla at my parents’ place. Anyway, back to normal now, and I’ve got some great posts coming down the tubes soon - I’m working on a series of how-to articles for aspiring night photographers and light painters, so keep your eyes peeled and add Burnblue.com to your RSS feeds if you haven’t already!

LX3 Street Shot

Taken with the Panasonic LX3

Black and White Night

D300, 12-24mm f/4, Leadbetter Beach

Moto Camping with Jade

Jade and I spent the weekend (along with buddy Coakley) riding up the 33 and camping at Reyes Creek campground. It’s December though, so we had to load up on gear… here’s Jade and I on the V-Strom:

The great thing about off-season camping is that you generally have your pick of open campsites. Of the 30 or so at Reyes Creek, only one other was inhabited. We gathered a bunch of manzanita and had ourselves an enormous campfire, drank some beer and some liquor from mini-bottles, and retired for a good night’s sleep.

Just a few hundred feet before you get to Reyes Creek, you pass a funny little town encampment called Camp Scheideck, which contains lovely little bits of eccentricity like this faux graveyard, complete with noose:

We enjoyed the campsite so much though that we didn’t break camp until nearly three - which resulted in a fair portion of the long ride home happening in the dark (and worse, the cold). Coakley’s thermometer dipped to 38 at one point on the 166… it was viciously cold. We pulled over for gas in New Cuyama, but they were out (happens a lot out there), so I went around back to throw on some long underwear - instead I managed to throw out my back. So now that it’s freezing cold and I can barely move, what else can happen, right? Oh yeah, the police could pull us over for speeding… ;) Luckily the cop was nice and could see we were only hurrying because we were quickly becoming popsicles. He advised us to take it easy, and then made sure we did by tailing us for about 20 miles.

Despite all that at the end, it was a fantastic weekend.