Bill Wehner Photography

This is a technique rather than a technical post. The ideas here can be applied casually for cell phone photos or as part of a sophisticated lighting scheme. But let’s start with a digression…

Let There Be Light

“Photography” is a term derived from the Greek for “light writing”. No light, no photography.

Landscape and scenic photography is mainly dependent on “natural light” – sunlight, moonlight, starlight, and rarer light sources like lightning or wildfire. “Available light” adds human light sources to this list, especially around man-made structures and objects – firelight, street lights, porch lights, passing car headlights, and so forth.

A final addition to the list might be called “photographer light” – flash units, flashlights, headlamps, and so on. “Light painting” extends this category to time by using moving light sources played over the subject during a long exposure.

A Humble Light

Now to the point of this post – introducing the humble tea light.

Tea lights are a common decorative feature in restaurants and at parties or other events. Wedding and event photographers sometimes incorporate them in shots to liven up photos of reception table settings for example. They’re still available as wax candles, but increasingly common in LED form. The latter has many advantages: light weight, long life via replaceable coin cell batteries (some are even rechargeable), usability in breezy conditions, and (hopefully) unlikely to start fires.

Illuminating

But tea lights put out so little illumination, how could they be useful in the great outdoors?

This photo of Fort Jefferson involves a surprisingly complex collection of light sources.

The main light on the bridge and fort was natural light from the nearly full moon high in the sky to camera right plus a sprinkling of stars above the fort. But available light also came into play. A single light fixture in the roof of the sallyport cast light just inside the fort’s entrance. In addition, a Coast Guard cutter moored at the marina directly behind the camera position with deck and superstructure lights adding subtle color to the scene.

My contribution was “accent lighting” on the bridge itself – tea lights added by pacing off the bridge span and placing individual tea lights at equal intervals on the bridge edges.

In spite of the amount of light in the scene (and moonlight is actually pretty bright), the tea lights are bright enough to be lost in the warm pool of their own glow, which is just the effect I wanted. [I also shot this scene without the tea lights. That made for a nice photo, but thanks to the tea lights guiding the viewer into the scene, I think this version is much more interesting.]

The ruins of colonial era sugar cane mills dot many islands in the Caribbean including St. John in the US Virgin Islands. The wooden windmills that sat atop the towers are long gone with only the stone bases remaining (though the National Park Service has restored one at the Annaburg sugar plantation on St. John).

This particular mill sits atop a hill crest in a seldom visited spot with a couple of gravel parking spots and not much else – particularly no lighting.

Unlike the photo of Fort Jefferson which depended mainly on natural light, most of the light in this scene comes from light painting with a headlamp during a 30 second exposure. I started at camera right, playing light onto the flagstone pad at the tower’s base, then moving further right playing light on the tower for the bulk of the exposure.

And the tea lights? I put a half-dozen just out of sight in the left side of the entrance and another four out of sight in the window. They add a warm glow that really brings this shot to life. Being able to add and/or reposition lighting one tea light at a time is particularly convenient for quick experiments to get just the right light mix.

Shots like this take time and experimentation. I took around ten shots over the course of an hour with much reviewing and repositioning to dial in both the tea light setup and amount and direction of light painting needed. But I rather enjoy this process, especially when it leads to the photo I’d imagined. [In this case, being out of doors on a very pleasant tropical night didn’t hurt either.]

This shot was taken earlier in the day inside the base of the same tower shown in the previous photo.The interior was quite dark even in daytime so I was able to execute a long exposure with the same combination of light painting and tea light sources as in the exterior night shot.

The obvious difference is that the tea lights are an integral/visible element in this shot and I’ve balanced the exposure and lighting so they’re clearly visible as “candles” instead of being “light pools” as in the Fort Jefferson photo. If you look closely you can even see a little “starburst” around each.

You may be surprised to learn that, tea lights aside, lighting was done entirely in one pass with a headlamp. I set up a 30 second exposure with a 10 second start timer. After firing the timer, I ran up the steps and out of sight on the left side where I played light on the floor, up the column, and on the back wall as the exposure started. Then I covered the headlamp with my hand and moved out of sight on the right where I repeated the procedure. Finally, I ran back down the steps (again covering the headlamp) and lit the foreground walls and steps for the remainder of the shot from behind the camera. When in view of the camera, I was moving quickly with the headlamp covered, so my presence doesn’t register in the final result, but I like to think of myself as the ghost in the image.

Keeping It Simple

I’ve approached twilight and nighttime lighting in a variety of ways over the years. [One particularly cumbersome setup used a car battery and inverter to power color-controllable LED lights. I could get a lot of lighting effects with it, but I also had to haul it on a dolly.]

These days, my “lighting kit” is simple and lightweight. It includes a headlamp with white and red LEDs, a small multi-color flashlight (with red, green, blue, and bluish white settings), and a box of 24 LED tea lights (available for about $10 on-line). Occasionally I also use a flash unit which can be a harsh light source at night, but is good for fill-flash with wildflowers and other close subjects in daytime.

With careful planning, a handful of simple light sources can do wonders. A long exposure (or multiple exposures) can include light painting with, say, white light followed by a little red light to get a warm white quality. Separate identically composed images taken with different light colors can be combined in post-processing where hues can also be tweaked to get a wide range of final colors (similar to the way multiple images are combined in high dynamic range HDR imaging).

Digital imaging and the tools that come with it have greatly expanded what can be accomplished in the final image while simultaneously simplifying the lighting hardware needed in the field. We’ve come a long way from film days when we were at the mercy of film response curves and where everything needed to be captured in-camera. Huzzah!