Photographic Painting

This page attempts to show what I mean by 'Photographic Painting',
I have been taking pictures with my cameras for the last 50 years or so and then I stopped taking and started making pictures
- now I am creating them.  One of my painting passions is the Baroque period and Caravaggio's influence on art. 

I am now attempting to merge these two disciplines of painting and photography by using Light Painting to create images
using this period as a guide to producing a picture
- one that portrays the scene as I saw it not as the camera would normally recorded it.

How the light falls on an object, the direction, intensity, colour and hardness can completely transform or alter how that object appears to the viewer.
Think how different a floodlit building can look compared to the daytime, or how shining a torch up under your chin can make one look all spooky! 
If we can control this light, then we can decide how to portray each individual element of a painting or picture.

Light painting is doing just that - controlling the light in each part of the scene independently of other parts of it. 
I use a Light Brush, just as a painter uses a paint brush, to reveal, or not, the objects in the image in the way I want to emphasis their contribution in the final picture. 
This normally, but not always, requires one to take a number of exposures and then combine bits of them to form a final image. 
So, just being nitpicking, I do not produce photographs, but images; and the final image is a composite of a number of exposures, of a scene, which would have been impossible to actually photograph!

I get a tremendous buzz from taking the exposures as well as forming the final image during post-processing.

Here are a few examples, using different lighting techniques, to show how light can make a real difference to a picture.

I hope this explains the basic idea. 

If this interests you on a technical level, have a peek at my early attempts at describing it in Cabbage Painting!