My light-painting on Alyn Wallace's night photography book!
It doesn't happen often to be part of a photo book, especially if the book is by one of the most active and appreciated astro-photographers on YouTube: Alyn Wallace.
Intro
I have been following Alyn Wallace for a few years, fascinated by night photography and his way of telling its various aspects, technical and artistic, with the voice that only those who follow their passion can have. The video contents of him are pleasant, well argued, never banal although with YouTube photography channels you can risk in the repetitiveness of showing countless photos of the Milky Way in different angles and too much branded content.
Alyn Wallace is from Wales, she tells the territory of him very well and in fact the first video I saw on his channel was about an epic alignment of the full moon and a castle using a 600mm telephoto lens.
In the past years I never missed a monthly update on the night sky and the field tests of lenses suitable for the "extreme" conditions given by night darkness. A topic that interests me a lot since I have been creating photos in light-painting for quite a few years and I am always looking for ways to improve or take it to the next level. One of the best ways is to learn from the masters, right?
Photography aside, one of Alyn Wallace's videos that I liked the most was the one in which he tells the story of his career. How he decided to change her life by abandoning some habits and focusing on a more precise life path. Put it in your watch later list also because he managed to balance the brightness of the scene during the 28 minutes of the video, from sunset to night.
Alyn Wallace's book
The book is titled Photographing the Night Sky - technique, planning and processing and in more than 500 pages and 9 chapters is full of notions on all aspects of landscape photography in the darkness.
An encyclopedic work, maybe the best and most complete that can be found. The chapters deal with basic topics such as instrumentation, camera settings, multiple (long) exposure techniques that allow for more defined images.
Then we move on to notions of astronomy, tips on how to plan photographic exits and take home the result with the right settings and choosing the most suitable locations, some surprisingly ideal for the purpose.
It is completed with the inevitable chapter dedicated to photographic post-production, essential for night photography and which serves to further push the quality of the images.
My photo in the section dedicated to light-painting
On page 140 it's about light-painting, also intended as a way to enrich the foreground subject with details that otherwise would be unnecessarily dark and devoid of interesting details.
I must admit that I have done it several times in my solitary astro-photography outings in Salento. But my "contribution" to this fantastic book is one of the photos of which I am most proud of the 2021 season: a dance with the crescent moon as the background and the reflections on the sea water to enrich the scene.
The photo shows Cristina (thank you!) and was taken at 70mm f/2.8 ISO 640 and 3 seconds. A single exposure that, as Alyn sadi, makes the photo even more special.
In the section dedicated to creative light-painting, my photo is flanked by a creation of Tei Pelant, who illuminates the landscapes with lights mounted on a drone. We are on page 145.
I am super proud to have unexpectedly received the request from Mick, the editor of fotoVUE and Alyn to be part of a fantastic book, which I recommend to everyone. Proud because one of my creations was chosen to represent an art that I love and that has committed me for 7 years despite a thousand difficulties. Proud because it is worth more than a million likes and pushes me to do better and better.
Thanks to Mick from fotoVUE, very kind, and Alyn Wallace who I also admire because in DM he is the only one to have the reaction with the Milky Way.
Purchase the book here https://alynwallacephotography.com/photographing-night-sky-astrophotography-book
Follow Alyn Wallace on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/c/AlynWallace
Buy the book on fotoVUE https://www.fotovue.com/shop/