Zlatorog (Mala Savica Rapids Lit Two Ways), Gorenjska Slovenia
The Zlatorog is a superb Slovenia folk beast/hero, who when shot by a hunter goes wild in rage and gores out a valley from rock.
A chamois or mountain goat, I kind of saw his determined, wild eyes and horns in the flow of the water. It's shot just downstream from this light painting at the Mala Savica stone bridge which I took last year.
If you get there early and work as the night falls, you forget how horrifically scary it is when it's dark. And by then you have to leave anyway. It's easy to understand how these folk tales, and grimmer ones, came to life in Central Europe. Walking along with a military spec LED and second torch to light my way is a thing of terror, even though there's nothing in the woods. Try that with whale oil in a sputtering lantern and bears, wolves, bandits, etc. lurking in the shadows.
Still - this was an experiment. The left is lit with feathered continuous light from an LED. The right is lit from below with a single 1/8 power zap from a Canon 600EX-RT. Without adding light the scene would have been black.
I started shooting long exposure in urban surrounds, looking for scenes with movement that could be blurred over ten minutes. As I started to shoot long exposure in the country, things looked flat. Movement being blurred, it turned out, isn't what appealed to me in the urban environments - rather it was the way that light sources were limited, and how that changed the mood.
The more I shoot rural long exposure, the more I find that means adding light to sculpt the scene to your vision - or you are left, to my mind, a little flat.
Hope everyone is having an incredible start to the weekend!
Zlatorog (Mala Savica Rapids Lit Two Ways), Gorenjska Slovenia
The Zlatorog is a superb Slovenia folk beast/hero, who when shot by a hunter goes wild in rage and gores out a valley from rock.
A chamois or mountain goat, I kind of saw his determined, wild eyes and horns in the flow of the water. It's shot just downstream from this light painting at the Mala Savica stone bridge which I took last year.
If you get there early and work as the night falls, you forget how horrifically scary it is when it's dark. And by then you have to leave anyway. It's easy to understand how these folk tales, and grimmer ones, came to life in Central Europe. Walking along with a military spec LED and second torch to light my way is a thing of terror, even though there's nothing in the woods. Try that with whale oil in a sputtering lantern and bears, wolves, bandits, etc. lurking in the shadows.
Still - this was an experiment. The left is lit with feathered continuous light from an LED. The right is lit from below with a single 1/8 power zap from a Canon 600EX-RT. Without adding light the scene would have been black.
I started shooting long exposure in urban surrounds, looking for scenes with movement that could be blurred over ten minutes. As I started to shoot long exposure in the country, things looked flat. Movement being blurred, it turned out, isn't what appealed to me in the urban environments - rather it was the way that light sources were limited, and how that changed the mood.
The more I shoot rural long exposure, the more I find that means adding light to sculpt the scene to your vision - or you are left, to my mind, a little flat.
Hope everyone is having an incredible start to the weekend!