Campfire Ghosts

Light painting photography

This manipulated digital artwork is light painting photography depicting several nudes. Ethereal specters rise up like flames, evoking memories of storytelling around a campfire. Seven glowing figures swirl around a point of focus, crouching, dancing, swaying, and crawling. Gleaming faces top some of the golden bodies; others are faceless. Arcs of motion obscure details in the darkness. The flamelike swirls evoke the feeling of motion, the passage of time, and warmth emitting from the inky night.

Defined features intermix with hazy curves as golden tones give way to chilly purples. The color palette is mostly these two tones, with an occasional accent of ruby red or drab gray. An array of patterns and shapes can be imagined in the randomness. This composition provides endless opportunities to explore the blurring of limbs, torsos, faces, and hair with a mixture of pleasant and startling results. A faint grainy texture anchors the figures to solid ground in front of the indistinct nocturnal backdrop. The lines between tiles give the viewer a sense of scale to these otherwise isolated figures.

The light painting origins of this image allow for experimentation and examination that continues with the viewer. Light painting photography is a form of time-lapse photography, where in this case, the subjects participate by dancing while holding light sources. In effect, they paint themselves with light during the course of a few seconds. An array of patterns and shapes can be imagined in the randomness. This light painting photography composition provides endless opportunities to explore the blurring of limbs, torsos, faces, and hair with a mixture of pleasant and startling results.

Various light sources are used to illuminate the subject over a period of several seconds. In this case, a mixture of continuous (LED) and strobe (flash) illumination was used to provide a combination of indistinct and crisp imagery.