Portrait Photography: Light Painting and Long Exposure Shots

I went into the studio to do my first lightpainting in over a decade. The last time I did lightpainting, I shot on film. Today was my first time doing it with a digital camera. Kyle volunteered to be my model. I told him to dress however he liked for the shot, so he chose to go as a character he plays at the Fantasy Alive LARP. He did his own makeup and costuming.

I had a difficult time in the studio, at first. I'm still not very comfortable with using my DSLR camera, but fortunately for me, Dave came along and helped me figure out the aperture settings, delayed trigger, and long exposure settings. I used my terrible tripod which is a rickety, almost useless thing. It will only let me shoot in landscape mode, and any kind of jostling might knock it over. I seriously need to get a better tripod.

The next issue I had to deal with was the light pollution in the photo studio. Despite being told that the studio would be nice and dark, this was not the case. There is a wall phone with a lit display and there are are significant gaps around the door. I did the best I could do with draping stuff over all the light sources. I didn't get the perfectly black room that I wanted, but it was close enough for my long exposures.

The next thing I had to do was rig up some flashlights for light painting. I had two flashlights and an iPhone to use. Without augmentation, the lights were too diffused. So we made paper casings for the two flashlights, and Dave fashioned a little paper box that fit over his iPhone. He made a gobo with that paper box, and we were set. The other source of light I used for my shots was an array of seven tea light candles.

(Unless otherwise noted, all the photos here are raw and unedited.)





When we finally had the room set up the way I wanted, I got Kyle to sit in a chair and I focused the camera upon him. With Dave's assistance with one flashlight, we began experimenting with double-faced images. He lit Kyle's face on one side, then turned out the light. Kyle turned his head to face the other direction, and I painted his face with my light. Here are a couple of the images from this series.





I next tried a long exposure shot with just the candles and no movement. This is a ten-second shot, if I remember correctly.



Satisfied that I knew what I was doing with the camera now, Dave left, and I finished off the shoot doing all the lighting myself. I decided to try light painting with the array of candles and got some excellent effects with it.

This next shot is the only one I did any post-process work on. All I did was adjust the brightness and contrast.





Lastly, I did light painting with just one flashlight. Here are my two favourite shots with this technique.





I still do not understand how to use the studio lighting and will need assistance figuring that out, but I feel competent with long exposure shots and light painting.

The Advent of Relief Printing

Relief printing is a process in which a surface is etched or cut away so that the only surface remaining is the design to be transferred to a substrate. Some examples of relief printing are linocut, woodcut, metal cut, and anastatic printing (Encyclopedia Britannica, 2012, para. 1). Although the sixth edition of MEGGS’ History of Graphic Design claims relief printing was first developed in China during the Han Dynasty in the third century CE (Meggs & Purvis, 2016, p. 39), further research demonstrates the possibility of earlier examples in Egypt. Murals in the tomb of Beni Hasan, dating from around 1980 BCE depict garments which look like they have been block printed. Nevertheless, there are no known extant block-printed textiles from this period (Nydam, 2012, para. 5).

The oldest extant examples of relief printing do come from China, and two hypotheses describe how this early printing was achieved:

1. Engraved seals, developed to make imprints in unbaked clay, were co-opted for use on paper. Instead of pressing the seals into clay, the surfaces of the seals were pressed into a red ink made from cinnabar, then pressed onto another substrate. This resulted in a red shape with the negative space creating white characters. Artisans cut away the area surrounding these characters so that these characters could in turn be printed in red on white paper.
   
2. Stone tablets were inscribed with words and then these tablets were inked. Damp paper was then laid atop of these inscriptions and pressed into the depressions with a brush. Next, a cloth pad imbued with ink was rubbed over the paper to produce an accurate copy of the inscription (Meggs & Purvis, 2016, pp. 39-40).

The Chinese are also credited with inventing movable type. Alchemist Pi Sheng fashioned three-dimensional characters from a mixture of glue and clay and cured them with fire. Pi Sheng affixed them onto a plate, inked them, and used them in the same fashion as block printing. When the printing was complete, the form was heated to loosen the wax so the characters could be put away until the next time they were needed (Meggs & Purvis, 2016, p. 46).

References

Encyclopedia Britannica. (2012). Relief Printing. Retrieved January 21, 2018, from https://www.britannica.com/topic/relief-printing

Meggs, P. & Purvis, A. (2016). History of Graphic Design (6th Edition). Hoboken, USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Nydam, A. (2012, February 3). The Oldest Block Prints in the World [Blog post]. Retrieved January 21, 2018 from https://nydamprintsblackandwhite.blogspot.ca/2012/02/oldest-block-prints-in-world.html

Question

What are your thoughts on ancient Egyptian block printing on textiles?