Light A Candle, Curse The Glare

Posted by Russ Devan (New Hanover, United States) on 4 October 2008 in People & Portrait and Portfolio.

This is the final installment of our comparitive image series.

Following our portrait session at French Creek State Park and Hopewell Furnace, Betsy and I thought we'd have some fun with some light painting at Lockridge Furnace. Lockridge Furnace is a 19th century forge and steel making plant that closed down in the early 20th century. All that remains are ruins of some of the old stone buildings.

For this image, we decided to have Betsy hold a candelabra in an attempt to give the ruins a more mysterious look. Betsy had to remain very still while I painted her with a flashlight along with key architectural elements of the building in which she was standing. Although you can't see me, I crossed in front of the lens several times (with the flashlight off, of course), but I was wearing dark clothing and made sure that I was in constant motion so that the open shutter did not record my image (besides, you wouldn't want a big hairy guy in a hoodie upstaging a pretty woman in a dress in her own photograph, now would you? Me neither). Confounding our efforts that night was the full moon which illuminated everything very brightly and played tricks on the camera as we painted the well-illuminated walls with a flashlight. Adding to the fun, I got to operate both my camera and Betsy's camera simultaneously, which she had set up to also record this image.

During our night portrait session, we were briefly visited by the local police who drove by, scanning the area with a very bright flood light, looking for rif-raf. We paused for several minutes before we took the next photograph, anticipating the cops paying us a visit and making us produce ID and explain why we were out in a public park taking pictures in the middle of the night and holding lighted candles, carrying flashlights, and other odd-looking equipment. I guess we didn't look threatening because they never got out of their car and visited us, so we just kept shooting.

The title? Taken from the lyrics of my favorite Grateful Dead tune with my favorite Jerry Garcia guitar solo. I'll see if anyone can guess the song title. This should be easy for ardent Dead Heads.

Please click here to view Betsy's interpretation of this image.

Many thanks for visiting and checking out this collaborative effort that Betsy and I put together and thank you for your many comments and input. Special thanks to Betsy for being such an inspirational muse and for offering to model to begin with. She had a lot of creative ideas, a ton of patience, infectious enthusiasm, and was just plain fun to work with. Hopefully, we'll have more images to share with you from future photoshoots. In the meantime, please have a look at the balance of the images from this photoshoot which I have placed in two new galleries in my portfolio. Please feel free to leave comments or critiques there as well.

"The Master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he is always doing both."
- Zen Buddhist Text

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