
The surreal art of ‘unnatural lighting’ - tumidpandora
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2020/09/the-surreal-art-of-unnatural-lighting/
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aaronbrethorst
Reuben Wu’s _Aeroglyphs_ is one of my favorite series of photographs from
recent memory. Really stunning work.
[https://reubenwu.com/projects/25/aeroglyphs](https://reubenwu.com/projects/25/aeroglyphs)

~~~
neilpanchal
I asked myself, would the same images, if rendered in CG or photoshopped, lose
their charm/appeal? My conscience responds with a resounding "Yes". So, then
the process itself must be the art and not the end result. The process being
actually flying the drone, taking long exposures instead of pressing buttons
on a keyboard and moving the mouse to generate or modify an image. Why is the
former process more appealing than the latter? Both are intellectually
challenging processes. I always struggle with this internal dialog.

~~~
kebman
This is a pretty normal view. I've been a photographer and videographer since
I was about 16, and worked freelance and in magazines all over my country
before I got into teaching and IT.

If you read any film theory book, you'll eventually come accross Cahiers du
Cinéma and André Bazin, one of the philosophers who most greatly influenced
the Nouvelle Vague movement of cinema in France.

He would argue that the second you even _point_ the camera at something,
that's when the editing of reality starts. So in the end, what really matters,
is the expression you're looking for. So work on that, and worry less about
the tools you use to get there.

Many have since tried to challenge this view in various ways, including the
Direct Cinema, and Cinema Verité movement, and even up to guys like Lars von
Trier with his rather stringent Dogme manifesto. Because when you've mastered
all other forms, the only way to challenge yourself is to give yourself
artificial limits.

So do you _morally_ have to say no to CG or photoshopping? Absolutely not.
It's a tool like any other. You can use it to enhance the experience. And with
todays digital cameras, it is often needed to glean the experience you had
when watching the subject in real life, kind of like the expressionist
painters of yore, who would strive to paint the feeling they had with the
subject, rather than illustrate "the truth." Or you can willfully subject
yourself to artificial limits, because it's a challenge.

With that said, I think the photos shown here reveals brilliant and inspired
creativity with new techology and tools, and in the end, that's what it's
about: To make something fantastic out of perhaps untraditional tools, either
because it's a challenge, or because you have a grand vision—or both.

Anyway, I hope this gives you some inspiration to pick up your camera (any
camera, even the one on your iPhone), and challenge yourself. All the best!

~~~
marnett
This is such an informative comment on a niche I am so foreign to. Thank you
very much for sharing.

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dylan604
I love the fact that tech is so cheap that tinkerers can do some interesting
things now. Light painting has been gaining from the simple use of a light
source to illuminate something for long exposure photography for a while now.
However, the creative means of lighting with the new toys that cheap tech is
allowing for has made it even more fun to play. Also, the sensitivity of the
new camera sensors make have helped.

I'm old school, my favorite light source for light painting is the full moon.
Everything looks daylight until you notices the give tell-tales like smoothed
out water to indicate long exposure, or night stars in the blue sky[0]. If
timed correctly, you can get a moon strike which is where it starts while the
moon is below horizon, and then the image starts to change as the moon
rises[1]. I wish I had a link of live action video shot with nothing but
moonlight.

If you have an actual budget, you can bring out enough lights to colorfully
light up the side of a mountain[2]. (I have nothing to do with the making of
this video)

[0] [https://vimeo.com/241441999](https://vimeo.com/241441999) [1]
[https://vimeo.com/241600503](https://vimeo.com/241600503)
[2][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReMPjkJdvMY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReMPjkJdvMY)

~~~
h6d-100c
While a lot of the tech so cheap, the cameras that Reuben uses cost 60K+ plus
;) He was the primary photographer phase one used to launch their new
mirrorless/tech camera body.

Not that it probably makes a substantial difference in achievable end product
probably.

~~~
dylan604
Fair play, but camera prices are not part of the tech I was talking about. I
come from the motion picture world, so a $60K+ camera is also quite cheap.
I've used lenses that cost >$60K each, so maybe I'm desensitized to camera
prices.

I was talking about cheap electronics to make the LED builds that make for
cool blinky blinky things. OSS running on commodity hardware in the form of
Arduino/Pi/etc allows for dependably repeatable motion control. For a few
hundred dollars, you can make your camera appear to float and run all day on a
single LiPo battery charge. You can literally make your camera fly with very
affordable drones. You can buy BT/WiFi components so you control all of this
with your phone. If you were a hacker 20 years ago, your inner youth would be
drooling over this stuff.

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thinkling
I prefer the natural bird flight time lapses ("Ornitographies") of @xavibou

[http://www.xavibou.com](http://www.xavibou.com)

[https://instagram.com/xavibou](https://instagram.com/xavibou)

~~~
30minAdayHN
dang! these are so creative. thanks for the pointer. i always wondered about
capturing flights' time lapses. this is much harder than the flights. i wonder
what inspired them.

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legerdemain
The artist is the Reuben Wu from the band Ladytron. Interesting that his
"second act" is getting the metaphorical spotlight.

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StavrosK
I've always considered Ladytron his second act.

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blasdel
When done with video it looks like a real-world raytracing demo:
[https://www.stratusleds.com/aerial-leds](https://www.stratusleds.com/aerial-
leds)

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Animats
Painting with light has long been used to make shadowless photographs of
industrial and military components.[1] It's used there for clarity, not
artistic effect.

[1]
[https://maritime.org/doc/threeinch/img/plate001.jpg](https://maritime.org/doc/threeinch/img/plate001.jpg)

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notatoad
artificial light in nature is the basis for one of the coolest ski films i've
ever seen: [https://youtu.be/4DjdJydl-ds?t=92](https://youtu.be/4DjdJydl-
ds?t=92)

~~~
jedimastert
I find I have few words to describe that video better than "dope as hell"

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jbarham
See also the Ball of Light series by South Australian based photographer Denis
Smith: [https://www.denissmith.com.au/ball-of-
light](https://www.denissmith.com.au/ball-of-light)

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bmitc
This is a totally different style, but I have recently become a huge fan of
James Turrell. There the light is "real" (i.e., it's not captured through
photography), but often using naturally produced sunlight along with
controlled colored light systems in tandem.

He's also building a massive art piece at Roden Crater. It's a big mind
boggling no one has used it for a sci-fi movie yet. If you ever get a chance
to see one his skyspaces or his artwork, I highly recommend it. It can be very
entrancing and meditative.

~~~
iamdbtoo
I experienced this one at LACMA a while back and it was incredible.

[https://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/james-turrell-light-
rei...](https://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/james-turrell-light-reignfall)

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mikece
Off-camera light and creative lighting are two of the most powerful ways to
create surrealism in a medium that, in theory, if capturing what is literally
happening in the real world. Realizing that photography literally means
"writing with light" has inspired my dabbling in the hobby of photography more
than anything else!

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crazygringo
This is super-interesting conceptually, and fascinating to look at.

But I can't help but feel you could get exactly the same output by compositing
daylight photos and gently photoshopping them in, as by compositing these
drone-illuminated shots and layering them in.

When you're trying to achieve this type of artificiality anyways, this seems
like an awfully expensive and complicated way to do it...

~~~
etrautmann
I initially agreed with you, but I think it would be hard to get the texture
of the illumination correct. The quantity of light and how elements shade each
other/etc, might be difficult to get right. For many applications it might not
matter though

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andrelaszlo
The photo of Crowley Lake made me curious. The columns that look carved out of
the stone at the shore are not man-made at all:
[http://www.geologyin.com/2017/01/mystery-of-crowley-lake-
col...](http://www.geologyin.com/2017/01/mystery-of-crowley-lake-columns-
solved.html)

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abalaji
This is some really beautiful work. Anyone know where we could get some
posters and support the artist?

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xwdv
You know what would really blow me away? If someone came up with a way to
convert a 3D polygon mesh into a drone's flight path so that it could render
any sort of 3D object into a scene with timelapse lighting. Light _rendering_.

~~~
StavrosK
I wrote a small script to do that with 2D SVGs, there's nothing difficult
about doing it in 3D.

~~~
xwdv
But did you make the drone fly the path?

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StavrosK
Yes.

~~~
xwdv
Why not make a post and harvest some karma? Would love to see the pics.

~~~
StavrosK
Unfortunately they didn't turn out very good and I didn't try again (maybe I
should). Here's a build log from the first attempt (click "build log"):

[https://www.makerfol.io/project/m8xrLUp-light-painting-
with-...](https://www.makerfol.io/project/m8xrLUp-light-painting-with-drones/)

I subsequently made a harness for the Mavic air too, that's the one the script
was written for.

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meigwilym
It's nice to see north Wales crop up on HN. Moel Tryfan and its quarry is one
of many in the locality. I'd usually call it unremarkable, but this photo has
taken it to somewhere else.

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allenu
Interesting photos. The artificial lighting makes many of these look like Star
Trek: TOS sound stages, especially the one of Moel Tryfan.

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paxys
It's amazing how the tiniest of touches change these pictures from average
nature photography to futuristic sci-fi.

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amelius
Does their lighting technique only work on inanimate objects?

~~~
dylan604
Typically, your light painting source is very low power so that it builds up
over the course of the exposure without over exposing. Doing long exposure
with people is hard. The subject would be required to stand extremely still.
Any movement will cause the subject to be blurry as they will literally be
appearing in multiple places within the image. If the subject moves too fast,
they will completely disappear from the image. We use this technique
frequently in music videos. I've also experimented with using flash strobes to
expose the subject in the split second even though the shutter remains open.
At that point, your subject can move out of frame and still be exposed from
the flash.

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cauliflower2718
Paywall :(

~~~
simonsarris
edit the url to place a period after .com so it reads:

[https://www.nationalgeographic.com./magazine/2020/09/the-
sur...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com./magazine/2020/09/the-surreal-art-
of-unnatural-lighting/)

~~~
kencausey
Why does that work?

~~~
kbr2000
Likely a web-server misconfiguration (check out name-based virtual
hosting[0]). Adding a trailing dot after the TLD (this signifies the root of
the DNS naming hierarchy) works fine, and you're referring now to an absolute
name (FQDN). How this get handled afterwards at the webserver side, depends
not just on the resolved IP, but on the name itself (which is passed from
client to server in the HTTP Host: header). And that's where this might fall
apart if the administrator didn't provide for this situation.

[0] [https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/vhosts/name-
based.html](https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/vhosts/name-based.html)

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tspike
As beautiful as the images are, I can't help but wonder if we really want to
be running loud, bright drones in the middle of the only quiet, peaceful areas
that still exist.

~~~
EForEndeavour
If it helps at all, the article mentions that the photographer uses exposures
"as long as 30 seconds," so these drones aren't in the air all that long.
Unless and until hundreds of copycat drone-light photographers start swarming
deserts and lakes, I don't feel too bad about the light and noise pollution
incurred to produce this shockingly creative landscape photography. Besides, I
bet the effects of a single drone flying for a few minutes pales in comparison
to the headlights, engine sounds, and emissions of the car used to get to and
from the photo location.

~~~
fiblye
>Unless and until hundreds of copycat drone-light photographers start swarming
deserts and lakes

If a few of these start trending on twitter/instagram/whatever, there will
definitely be hundreds of people doing this.

It's already hard to enjoy a trip to many places without a
"bbwweeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEE _EEEEEEEEEEEE_ " reverberating overhead.

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sandworm101
This is nothing new. There are various areas of professional photography that
have long used long exposures to selectively add light. Sometimes called
"flashlight painting", the photographer can use a literal flashlight to fill
in shadow areas selectively during a long exposure. This can produce images
that are not physically possible using static light sources. The use of a
drone over landscapes is a simple extension of this longstanding studio
technique.

[https://www.photigy.com/school/how-to-use-light-painting-
in-...](https://www.photigy.com/school/how-to-use-light-painting-in-product-
photography/)

~~~
bluntfang
>This is nothing new.

I feel like this comment has some good content and could hold its own without
this statement. It just feels a little antagonistic. Everything has been done
before, we're all on the shoulders of giants.

~~~
Retric
I appreciate a quick summary of a longer comment. Being aware of the context I
can more easily skim without missing anything.

