Light-painting with neon lights and fireworks on Guyam island.

Shooting the light-painting shot

I decided to go to my favourite location here for the last time (I’m leaving), the deserted Guyam island. Earlier this year, I shot a fire dancer under the Milky Way (view full Project here). I always wanted to try out something different with the island and experimenting light-painting seemed perfect. I ordered neon lights (break-lights) from Ebay and bought fireworks at the market.

With a few friends we headed to the island, on a hopefully rainless night. My idea was for everyone to create their own light-rope, then have them dance/swing/paint in front of the island and shooting whatever ideas we come up with. Along the way we decided to light-paint ‘Happy New Year! Guyam’. The firework shots turned out really hard as I had no experience and only had 6 tries of a few seconds, even at short exposures, ISO50 f22 it was overexposed. They weren’t very spectacular anyway and one didn’t even work. At least I got a few to decorate to the Happy New Year shot!

Tech specs

The image is a composition, the trees are composed of a few shots where I had my friends lighting up the trees with a flashlight and walking around between the trees with a manual camera flash. The sky was a separate shot, as was the shooting star. Each firework is a separate shot and the light-painting image as well. ‘Happy New Year! Guyam’ we took in 4 different shots. There’s even a bit of a Milky Way in there 🙂

Shot with a Nikon D750 + 14-24/f2.8 on my Sirui T2205 tripod. After editing in my RAW editor I overlayed the layers, used lighten-transparency, masked the subject and cloned a few areas.

We had a lot of fun that night, rum too, yohoho and Happy New Year to everyone!

Greetings from Guyam Island, Siargao, Philippines!

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