I've had the great pleasure to take a Photography on Location class with Tom Paiva, an architectural photographer with many, many years of experience.  His website and blog is located at tompaiva.com.  Please check out his site and see the incredible work he does. 

One of the assignments was to shoot at night in an industrial area looking for mixes of lighting of different color temperatures.  You can see this when one light appears to be white while another one may show up as a yellow light or a range of other colors.  I went one night down to the industrial area in Long Beach near the refineries and railroads with a friend.  If you want to try this, I strongly suggest going with one or more people, because these areas are dark and dangerous.  I was nervous as heck, but I was able to capture several images I was happy with.

Because it was so dark, the exposure times on these images were from approximately 30 seconds up to one minute for the bottom image where I had to boost up the ISO to 1000 because it almost pitch black.  This has been such an eye-opening experience into all sorts of photography that I'd only seen but never knew how to create!

I just went on a road trip to the Salton Sea along with fellow photographers and spent an interesting time learning new techniques and great hints on working with the environment by Tom Paiva, the instructor for this Photography on Location class.  His website and blog at tompaiva.com is a real inspiration.  

I used this opportunity to also shoot a couple friends in some wonderful indirect light.



Lumen Prints.

One form of alternative photographic process is called the lumen print.  This consists of taking a sheet of regular black&white photographic paper out of its light-sealed envelope, placing it in direct sunlight, placing different vegetation on top of the paper and letting it "cook" for a couple hours with a quick fix at the end.  I love the images that can be made using this method, but it goes against everything I was taught in my b&w class about never exposing your paper to light.  I still cringe whenever I bring new sheets out.

While experimenting with this technique, I thought about how to combine this with photographic imagery.  I printed out digital negatives of an image on transparency paper and then placed that transparency on top of the plant material and let it sit.  The almost ghostly qualities of the final prints make me want to explore this whole art form further.  The nice part is it only takes a few minutes (once you've printed your transparencies) to do your setup and then walk away for a couple hours to let it process.  This gives me plenty of time to work on other ideas.

These are two images of my favorite model Rachel.  This idea stemmed from an assignment on a Photography on Location class I'm involved in which has led me to consider expanding this into a series.  I already have several other concepts in mind.  I really like this image; however, in doing the shoot and looking at the final images, I want to try this image again but slightly differently to add yet another layer to it.  My model is willing to go again, so we'll see what happens.