The Making of a photograph

So Sunday evening I went out with a couple of friends, Jeremy Dueck, Patty Boge, and Alex Morrison, and had some fun just playing around with our cameras. One of the locations we went to was the Graffiti Gallery on Higgins Ave. It's a super cool location and you immediately get drawn in by all the great art that's on the walls... it's amazing work. Here is a shot of one small section, it's rather unimpressive, with a weird color of light coming from the street lights.



So how do you make this graffiti "pop" and make it look amazing, well we started painting ourselves. Okay not with paint, I can't paint like this but with light is another story. We took out some spot lights and while we were making the 30 second long exposure ran into the photograph and started "painting" the graffiti with light. We don't show up in the photograph because of the long exposure, as long as we keep moving we don't register in one spot long enough to be visible, you kind of become a ghost. Only one problem 30 seconds wasn't long enough to "paint" all the graffiti in one shot, so we had to do it in 3 shots...





This is where we go into Photoshop and start "building" the image. We layered all 3 images together and selectively added only the parts that were "painted" with light to build the image with all the graffiti lit up. Then add your own recipe of Photoshop filters/actions to give it that extra pop and you end up with this shot.



It's great to go out and play like this sometimes to reenergize yourself creatively.