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On March 18, 2012

Rock-A-Hoola

Heading to Vegas for the GIS Show, I had the opportunity to meet up with a colleague’s husband who is an avid night photographer. I have been trying to get involved in as many styles of photography including shooting HDR landscapes and building, various models in color and B&W, bokeh, and others.

So for the shots in this post, they were taken at Rock-A-Hoola Water Park. Not much of a water park you may be thinking. Well this water park is located a little over two hours west of Vegas on the way to Los Angeles. The drive was painful and involved about an hour delay due to traffic, which is pretty crazy considering there’s nothing along the route. The main issue was that trucks would have trouble getting up some of the large inclines and would slow to a snails pace and this would result in a near standstill. I digress.

So when we got to the water park, I realized 1) why Noctural Kansas thought this would be a great place to shoot and 2) he if freakin nuts for going to these places by himself. The park was literally in the middle of nowhere and as you can see from the images completely littered with destruction and graffiti. Either way, we setup shop and I began my lesson. This is one post where I wish I had a video to show the process in action.

The Basics

Prior to actually seeing this process in action, I would have thought that the technique was overly complicated and involved a lot of fancy equipment, but that was far from the truth. A general overview of the process includes setting up your camera on a tripod and setting it to shoot for approximately 3 minutes. I played with my camera settings a bit, but the teacher had his settings at f/5.6 with an ISO of 100. Once the camera shutter was opened and the process of letting the light fill the camera began, Noctural Kansas would make his way through various parts of the buildings and shine flashlights equipped with various colored gels at the areas he intended to light. Although I don’t have a photo, the custom built, ducktaped cardboard gel holders were ingenious an inexpensive way to get the job done.

Don’t let the simple process fool you though. I tried “painting” in one of the images below and it was clearly more of an art than I had anticipated. The rest of the images were painted by Nocturnal Kansas, but shot through my perspective and camera.

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