I would love to explore the capabilities of taking such photos, even though I wouldn't know where to start.
There are a couple different ways (hypothetically). First in photoshop. You take a photo, you fuck with the levels, the colors, etc. And you can add, combine, blend, etc more than one photo. For these photos that is most likely how it was accomplished. I can walk you through the process or even make a tutorial if you want more details. Look at the second photo. The artist is very skilled and you can see he took great case to blend the layers with the background (you can see the trees are actually slightly zoomed through each of the orbs, as if the orbs are a lens themselves). In the foreground you can see the colors on the ripples, mimicking the reflective properties of actual water. It isn't as simple as just making the orb semi transparent. It was probably a mixture of hand painting, blending modes, etc. The first photo is done the same - same reflections in the water, on the ground. The reflections on the tree's leaves and tree trunks are a bit too exaggerated for my taste. Hypothetically the same effect in photo 1 could be accomplished with light painting although it would be very very difficult, and still require a lot of photoshop work. I'm trying to figure out how you would successfully get the light to slowly change color like it does. For this you just need a DSLR or SLR with ability to control how long the lens is open for. I've played with this technique and it is a lot of fun, but very difficult to get the proper effect. I was using an SLR for film school, so it was especially difficult because you couldn't do trial-and-error. You had to note your settings, go get your film developed, check them out, and try again. The concept with light painting is that you have the lens which typically opens for a split second to capture the image. If you keep the lens open for longer, you can move very quickly and capture the movement in a single image. It works best with light in the dark because you need to open open the lens a tiny bit because as you capture the light from the foreground, you are capturing the same light over and over in the background. So if you do in during daylight, chances are you will quickly blow out the entire image. Wikipedia probably explains it better than me. Things like this are just like any skill. You have to have the technical skills to make the program or camera or whatever do your bidding. At the same time, you have to have a mission and patience, and vision.
Sorry for the late reply, I've been Hubski'ing on mobile and wanted to write a proper response . I'm intrigued by the tutorial you mention, I'd love to see it! I'm curious though, is it that the photographer has taken a photo, done a secondary identical layer and played with the levels? I've been wanting to get into light painting, long exposures etc, but haven't found what I want to capture. This might just be the inspiration to kick my butt into gear. This might sound a crazy, so let me know if so: There are apps and devices that graphically display WiFi signal strength with graphical displays (eg an oscilloscope). If you took one of those, and read the signals in a location that you photographed, could you then convert the oscilloscope signals into a color representation, then layer that image over the top of the visual photo layer? Apologies if that makes zero sense, I may have had some liquid inspiration in coming up with it.
Here's another simple but fun thing. I've drawn a line with my pen tool. I gave it some fun curves. Now, by double clicking on the layer that contains the line, I get a menu with all sorts of stuff. I can put a gradient on it. It can be black-white or any number of colors. I can make it go left to right or radial or top to bottom or whatever. I can add a glow to it. Whatever color, whatever size, whatever level of transparency. I can add a drop shadow in a different color And I can add texture to make it not as plain. You can download textures online too, or make your own. With enough time and patience I could make it look like the one in the photo in the article. From there, I would need to make another layer and instead of making a line, use a fuzzy brush with a low opacity or blending mode to lay over the background. This is the reflection. So I paint some with my brush: Then I change the opacity and set to blending mode: lighten. And change the color: Again! Paint: Color: Opacity/blending If you take enough time you can make it look good and realistic. That's more skill and time than I currently have.
Holy shitsnacks, I can't thank you enough for this! This is exactly what I was trying to process in my head when I tried to describe the oscilloscope/raw wavelength as-a-layer idea, and then how to add it in with graphical representation. Going to go out this weekend/week and give it a crack and see what I come up with. Thanks again and love your work!
Yes. You can do ANYTHING in photoshop. It's just a matter of setting your mind to it, and learning the program. I'm a big believer in "learn by doing." Don't go and sit and do 40 hours of photoshop because you want to learn. Go and learn the exact skills in order to accomplish at hand and you will learn 4 times as much in those 40 hours. So here's your background landscape, whatever: Now to add a layer, you can add another photo, or a shape, or a graphic or whatever you want. I made a circle. Here's the circle with a 50% opacity and a variety of "blending modes" You change those in the little boxes above the layer panel. Now if you want to play with the levels you go to the adjustments layer and you can edit the whites, grays, and blacks. And the reds, greens, and blues, individually. This is how you color correct images. You want the whites to be true white (255,255,255) and blacks to be true black (0,0,0) You can use color sampler to look at the individual numbers of red/green/blue - look in the upper right at the numbers. Using the levels adjustment layer to edit the levels. You can also fuck with them to do all sorts of crazy things, like making something really blue or red. Those levels are a new layer that affect all layers below it. Or you can set it to only affect a certain area. Same goes for all the adjustment layers in photoshop: photo filters, hue, saturation, lightness, etc. So you can have essentially an unlimited number of layers. These layers can be photos, shapes, graphics, anything! And you can edit the color, blend and other things like shadow, glow, texture, etc. all individually. This is super super basic and doesn't go into much at all. Let me know what you want me to elaborate on - I could write an essay about any of these things.If you took one of those, and read the signals in a location that you photographed, could you then convert the oscilloscope signals into a color representation, then layer that image over the top of the visual photo layer?
