Last Saturday after a long day of shooting, I tried my hand at “light painting”. This is the spot we parked Kyles car. Located on the south side of Coronado island.

After the sun went down and it was totally dark out, I set up my camera to take a 8 second long exposure at f5.6. The first shot produced a black image so that meant the background would not show up once I started to use the light. I set a 10 second delay giving me time to set the camera, cross the street and get prepared to “paint”.  This was my first test shot.

You can see the streak of light above car. I started to make the adjustment to keep the reflection off the side window. By walking the light over the top of the car it lit the top line very well. Unfortunately a truck drove by and added a bit of an artsy red stripe.

I did the same method over again minus the truck to get this result.

I was happy with the top line so now I had to expose the side of the car to make sure and get Kyle’s new Vorsteiner wheels.

Now came the processing. I took the two photos and layered them one atop the other. Using a layer mask I blended the two photos together. Once completed, I then used a clone stamp to get rid of the unwanted light trails and the lit foot steps you can see. I took the now merged image, duplicated the layer and desaturated the image. This was to get the blue tinge off of the wheels. Using a layer mask I blended the desaturated wheels into the image, making sure not to touch the bright red brake calipers. This is the final image. It may be one of my favorite photo’s I’ve ever done.