Hi All,
Allow us to introduce Vicki Wert, a passionate photographer who has joined us on many of our Photo Tours. Vicki teaches post-production at her camera club in Cleveland, OH, and is the deserving winner of many photo competitions. She and her husband Dennis have become dear friends over the years and each year we’re looking forward to seeing them again somewhere in Europe on yet another photo adventure. We missed them this year and we’re very much hoping for a reunion in 2021.
Vicki keeps exploring new and exciting ways of putting a camera to good use and when she told us about a workshop about still life light painting she took and we saw the stunning results, we thought that you would love to read about this technique and asked her if she’d be willing to share her experience. And here is Vicki (drumroll :-))
My Adventure in Still Life Light Painting
I love to do many types of photography, including landscape, wildlife, architecture, and macro. I’m also always looking to learn something new. This past summer I attended a rather intensive workshop to learn how to make still life photographs using light painting. There’s a lot involved in producing this type of photograph. It’s time-consuming, too, but I am really enjoying the entire process. I love the transformative results you can get on some pretty ordinary objects, which is achieved by a combination of lighting during the shooting, and masking during the post-processing. It’s so different than all other types of photography I’ve done, which usually includes hundreds of photos taken over a period of a few hours. For this technique, it’s several days to produce one image.
The general process is to light the subjects most often at a 45-degree angle with a few types of lighting, including a diffused flashlight, a panel, and a two-stop diffuser. Each component of each subject is lit as a separate image, photographed in a nearly completely dark room. The camera is tethered to the computer, which allows me to evaluate every image on the monitor.
Once all of the images are captured, they’re output to a hard drive, and I then process them in Photoshop. As a relative beginner at this technique, I find it’s taking me one to two hours to get the composition the way I want it and another two or so hours to do all of the photography. The processing is the most challenging part for me, and I spend several more hours over two or three days on the post-processing. Each image photographed is brought into the file as a layer, and I use a soft white brush at 10% opacity to reveal the appropriate areas of the black mask. In essence, I’m using the light to sculpt and show depth in the subject, and the mask to reveal what I captured in a creative way. I love watching the image come to life with each layer. I’m right-handed, so my images are usually shot with the light source coming from the right.
The image above includes items from an antique shop (old-fashioned mixer, Amish cookbook, and rolling pin) and everything else comes from my kitchen. This image includes 25 separate captures.
The second image has special meaning to me because the Mozart porcelain doll is from my mother’s collection. It has even more meaning because I’ve been a lifelong musician and have a bachelor’s degree in music. The sheet music is the Mozart Oboe Concerto, which I’ve played. I used the wind-up metronome all through college. Since the doll’s head faces to the left, I needed to do the light painting left-handed, which made it all the more challenging. My first attempt at this setup was an utter failure, so I reworked the composition and this is the result of my second try. This image consists of 21 captures.
The third image is a relatively simple composition – a bottle of tequila and a margarita. Since it takes me so long to complete the photography, I couldn’t use real ice cubes, because they would melt as I was shooting and the composition would change. Everything must stay completely still during the shooting, or the registration of the image will be off. That is, the layers will not line up in post-processing. So I used artificial ice cubes and colored water for the margarita. This image required 21 captures.
I’m so glad that I found this technique. Subject matter and inspiration are open-ended. I’m counting on it keeping me busy throughout the long pandemic winter coming up!
Vicki Wert
To see more of Vicki’s work, please click here. »
Great story and beautiful images, Vicki! Keep up the fantastic, creative work!! Hope to see you again soon when the pandemic ends. :)
What an incredible photographer . . I love, love the Still Life Light Paintings, but also the detailed plant photos, so beautiful . . thanks for sharing !
Vicki, These are beautiful. Such depth! Thanks for sharing the technique, I’ll have to give it a try. Hope to see you and Dennis on another trip. (And that’s trip as in journey or excursion; not trip as in stumble, both of us have had enough of the later…)