KISHAN THAKRAR
A LEVEL ART PHOTOGRAPHY PORTFOLIO
Long Exposures
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Light Trails
Star Trails
Starbursts
For these images I was inspired by some photos on pinterest, in particular, this creative zoom exposure of a christmas tree by Greg Foster.
The image was a long exposure, and the camera was zoomed out over the long exposure. I liked the idea of moving the camera instead of the subject, to create the light trail, but I used a pan from left to right instead of a zoom on these images. I firstly did a longer 3 second exposure with a quick pan, and this showed lots of light trails but not much of the background. The second image is a shorter exposure so that you still see trails but I held the camera still for longer at one end of the pan so that the christmas tree would come in focus.
The images in this section are based on different types of light trails.
Pan/Zoom Exposures
Car Light Trails
I took inspiration from this photo by Matthew Fang, a flickr user (https://www.flickr.com/photos/matthewfch/1688409628/).
I took some of my own long exposures of traffic:
I looked at doing hour long exposures of stars at night, as I'd seen amazing inspiration from Andrew Stawarz and other artists, which showed me how star trails show a different perspective of stars that is not visible to the naked eye.
I experimented with this technique, however I was limited due to being in the middle of England in a location where stars were not fully visible all the time. I did manage to capture some star trails, however, just not as impressive as Stawarz's. I set my camera on manual mode and set the exposure to bulb mode, allowing the shutter to stay open for a prolonged amount of time.
My photos had around 40 minute exposures. This showed some movement in the stars, creating interesting trails:
Due to a very weak light source coming from inside the house, the reflection in the window over 40 minutes is noticed , and the interior can be seen in the reflection. I needed to make sure there was absolutely no light coming from inside to fix this, otherwise this photo captured the most stars with the biggest trail, and although there were not many stars, it is still quite interesting.
Click to enlarge images. The bottom right image is the one I liked the most as I was able to capture more than one car from a closer angle to the road, and it results in a futuristic glow, almost asking for the image to be less green and with an added vignette to concentrate the viewer on the light streak, hence my edited version:
Here I simply adjusted the Blue and Green curves adjustment layers in Photoshop, bringing down the green levels slightly, and raising the blues. I also increased the brightness slightly, ensuring the light streak was as vibrant as possible, also aiming for a Sci-Fi look.
I also took inspiration from this photo by Rob Cartwright (https://robcartwrightphotography.wordpress.com). This is a more abstract long exposure, taken handheld, probably whilst in a car at night. I like the way there are no smooth lines, as there are in the other long exposure photos I have looked at. I also liked how you can interpret it in different ways, because of the fact it is so abstract and bizarre.
My Rob Cartwright style abstract long exposures:
Abstract Long Exposures
Light Painting
When I chose 'Creative use of Light' as my topic, I knew I wanted to involve light painting, but not creating letters or shapes with a single torch in the air. So, when looking for artists and inspiration, I was looking out for abstract and/ exciting photos using lots of light. I came across a photographer Dana Maltby, and saw this photo:
The second of his photos his almost like an orb, with very smooth curved light streaks, and overlapping colours from the different coloured lines. In my photos in this style, I used a strip of LED lights that were different colours:
I like the sense of chaos and energy that comes across from these pictures, juxtaposed against the very dark backgrounds. I also experimented with creating silhouettes using a person and the lights.
I also took a few photos experimenting with high apertures to create sharp images with starburst coming from light sources in the photos:
