Old-School Location Lighting with New-School Tools

The earliest use of added lighting in night photography was born of necessity and came in the form of burning strips of magnesium wire in the mid-19th century. The remarkable Vargas brothers of Peru were the first to employ lighting combined with long exposures for creative purposes in the 1920s, and the great train photographer O. Winston Link used complex flash and strobe setups in the 1950s to achieve his iconic images.

It wasn’t until the 1970s that artificial light and night photography formally got together and light painting was born. Photographers began using handheld flashlights and strobes to add light to their images, and a few early adopters such as Richard Misrach and Eric Staller led the charge for what eventually became a recognized technique and later a genre of photography. Technological advances in digital photography and lighting tools allowed Royce Bair and others to develop the Low-Level Lighting (LLL) technique for working in starlight conditions about 10 years ago.

More recent refinements to the tools used in LLL—including light modifiers and the ability to fine-tune color and intensity, as well as remote-operation capabilities—have made more traditional location lighting techniques viable for lighting in a variety of dark environments.

In this talk, Lance Keimig will present and discuss his recent work using multiple LED light panels. This technique is a hybrid style of LLL that is more akin to the traditional location lighting used by editorial and corporate photographers in the field.

You’ll leave this session inspired to add this useful and convenient lighting technique to your night photography toolkit.