Joshua Tree National Park is fantastic for night photography. How can light painting help take your desert photo to the next level?
What is light painting?
The term is often used loosely to describe any addition of light to a night photograph. Really, though, light painting is a technique that uses a handheld light source to illuminate a scene during a long exposure. Your flashlight is your paint brush, and you are quite literally painting the scene with light. Similar to a film director, you control what you illuminate and what you keep in shadow using your handheld light. Night photographers have used this technique for many decades.
Let’s see how I went about light painting this Joshua Tree.
A bit about Joshua Tree National Park
Joshua Tree National Park in California has been a National Park since 1994, and at almost 800,000 acres, is larger than the state of Rhode Island. About three million visitors come each year to enjoy diverse rocky desert “Star Trek”-like landscapes, bighorn sheep sightings, spectacular sunrise and sunsets, rock climbing, hiking, stargazing, groves of otherworldly Joshua Trees, and yes, night photography. This includes night photography with light painting.
Two easy steps to illuminating the Joshua Tree during the exposure
I was testing a light that had just been released, the Ants on a Melon RGB Critter BT. This versatile handheld light produces every light under the rainbow and more, and has an easy-to-use app. I was testing this light in Joshua Tree for a review article.
Step one: Warm white light on the left side
Using the Ants on a Melon app, I set the light to a very warm custom light that I had created myself and saved as a preset. I set the intervalometer to shoot successive two-minute exposures continuously.
Then, from about 25 feet (7-8 meters) away, I illuminated the tree with the RGB Critter BT. I slowly moved the light up and down, literally painting light on the Joshua Tree. The camera, after all, would cumulatively record the lighting of the tree. I lit the trunk of the “tree” more than the brighter spiny leaves on the top so that the light painting would be more even. After all, the brighter spiny leaves reflect more light, and I didn’t want them to be significantly brighter than the trunk.
I used “tree” in quotes because a Joshua Tree is not actually a tree. It is part of the agave family, and is also known by its name Yucca brevifolia. See how much you are learning from an article about light painting?
Step two: Deep red light on the right side
I ran to the other side of the Joshua Tree. Also standing at about the same distance as the other side, I slowly illuminated the right side of the towering yucca plant.
Observant readers might notice that I used a slightly sharper angle with the red light than I did with the white light. I just wanted the small part of the right side to be illuminated so I wouldn’t bathe half the plant in red light. The angle that you choose to light paint anything makes an enormous difference in the quality, detail, and perceived sharpness of the subject.
Night photography with light painting is rarely ever passive. It’s the most actively creative form of photography I’ve encountered.
What I did not light paint
I didn’t light paint the middle of the Joshua Tree. That is left in shadow.
Lighting from both sides creates a lot of drama. It’s the reason why many photographers doing portraits of sports athletes choose this method. It looks stark, bold, and dramatic.
I’m done…time to eat a sandwich!
I just light painted the first two-minute exposure of my star trails photo. After that, the camera kept clicking away continuously for 24 minutes in total (12 two-minute photos, all done with the venerable Pentax K-1 full frame DSLR camera and 28-105mm lens). Because later in Photoshop, we are “stacking” the photos in Lighten Mode, all the brightest parts of each photo shine through in one single image. This is part of the magic of star trails and how it shows the apparent movement of the stars over such a long period of time.
While the camera clicks away automatically and continuously, I can do numerous things.
One of them is to eat a sandwich. With this much running and walking around, I can sometimes work up quite an appetite. Regardless, it’s the desert. It’s important to keep drinking water. Yes, even at night, it’s important to keep hydrated.
Other things I do? Sometimes I use my other camera and take more photos! Also, I could scout new locations to photograph or say hello to my night photography friends.
And other times, I can lay on my back and look at the inspiring night sky.