A great evening, spent painting with light under the North Pier at Blackpool. The tide was out, but approaching fast; we all knew how quickly that water can whip in behind you, potentially cutting you off from the shore. We stood under the massive iron structure in near-total darkness, listening to the waves creep closer while we worked.

I decided to use the Canon 580EXII to manually paint some light across the weathered pillars and the underside of the pier. It’s a bit of a dance in the dark—trying to guess where the light is falling during a long exposure. To be honest, I’m not totally convinced I nailed the technical side of it; it could have been a lot sharper, but as a 30-second experiment in the pitch black, I was pretty happy with the atmosphere we captured.

To get the scale of the structure, I went as wide as possible with the Canon EF17-40mm f4 L Series at 17mm. Shooting wide open at f/4 and bumping the ISO to 400 allowed me to pull in enough ambient glow to complement the flash work.

Huge thanks to Olivia, Steve, Carol, and Claire for the photo fun that evening—it’s these kinds of sessions that make the “blogging season” so worth it.

Processing this back in Photoshop CS3 and Lightroom 2 was all about balancing those deep shadows against the artificial light I introduced. It’s a far cry from the candid street shots earlier in the day, but that’s the beauty of the Northern Empire—you can go from gritty character portraits to surreal light painting in the space of a few hours.

• taken|17 september, 2011
• camera|Canon EOS 5D
• focal length|17mm
• aperture|f/4
• shutter speed|30s
• iso|400
• flash fired|no
• exposure bias|0 ev