Light painting

David Kanoa James

Time

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Light Painting

            How does one portray time with a camera? Easily. Every photo you take is a snapshot of that 125^th of a second. Every photo you take is a documentation of a feeling, an experience or view. But how do we get past that? Is there anyway to depict time in a photo without relating to the then? I don’t think I have an answer to this problem, but during this experiment and assignment, I tried to take the focus away from the moment or time the photo was taken and redirect it to the actual photo.

            I decided that a great way to have fun and represent this was to do some light painting. Here the expression of time is still given because the shutter must be open for a specific amount of time to get the desired effect. The moment captured through this process is much longer than an instant; in fact, it can catch an entire event. With light painting I was able to be very creative with my friends to depict scenes from our imagination that would otherwise be impossible to recreate with the budget of a college student.

            However, it still relates back to the fact that at one moment in time we created these fantasies of ours on a camera. These photos will always represent the time that we spent to create these shots. These photos will always show a moment in time. Personally I don’t think that you can navigate away from that idea that a photo captures a moment of time. But at least I tried with my concept of light painting.