The surreal art of ‘unnatural lighting’

I think they're both aspects of the art, as is the feeling they give you. See, for example, the $120,000 banana duct-taped to the wall.

https://www.instagram.com/sethithy/

I think it all makes more sense if you focus on the art-experience.

It is OK for something that wasn't intended as art--like a torn sign, or a true accidental technical glitch--to trigger an art-experience for you. It is OK if knowing--or not-knowing--details about a technique, technology, or process affects whether you have an art experience.

Light painting in the sky is one thing, but getting the light source to simultaneously "paint" the foreground in a realistic way -- so it's suggestive how the two physically interacted -- requires another level of PS wizardry (at least beyond me).

* https://photos.app.goo.gl/9ED17BWiRfieVrap8

But for the pictures in the GP link, I don't think the pictures by themselves are all that interesting; to me almost the entire interest stems from knowing how they were made.

Somewhat comparable to pictures posted on HN a while back that went from "ho-hum, another portrait" to "that's actually interesting" by knowing that these were not real people or real photos, but rather computer generated portraits. (https://petapixel.com/2019/09/20/this-company-is-giving-away... )

So I think charm/appeal can stem from several sources, like pure visual impact, but it can also stem from an appriciation of the process behind it. And I see people sometimes change their minds on how well they like a picture - in either direction - based on how simple or complex they think the process was, even if the picture is identical. (Compare say a picture of a wild wolf pouncing its prey vs the same picture after you've learned that it's stuffed animals and the scene was arranged by the photographer.)

Taking a slightly different tack from the other responses so far: I don't think your second sentence there follows from your first. You are implicitly asserting that "rendered in CG or photoshopped" would and even could in fact produce the exact same art, and thus the process is the only differentiator. But I think an important limitation and value of doing this in the real world is that we cannot in fact actually perfectly reproduce the real world yet down to the visual spectrum limit. We can produce quite good facsimiles for sure, particularly zoomed out or in motion. But for high quality still photography of complex natural environments doing all the physics and replicating all the creation and weathering processes and so on exactly down to micron type levels is hard. Noting does reality like reality for the time being.

So I do think part of the charm/appeal here is precisely that the photographer is photographing something real, so you can really drill deep into the details with the knowledge that a human hand is revealing and highlighting those details, but did not craft them. Whereas with CG a human made decisions about every single bit of it (if only in choosing what algorithms/seeds were used or what result to accept for further work). Which itself can be extremely interesting! But they're genuinely two different things and I think do speak to different aspects of people.

If you read any film theory book, you'll eventually come accross Cahiers du Cinéma and André Bazin, one of the philosophers who most greatly influenced the Nouvelle Vague movement of cinema in France.

He would argue that the second you even point the camera at something, that's when the editing of reality starts. So in the end, what really matters, is the expression you're looking for. So work on that, and worry less about the tools you use to get there.

Many have since tried to challenge this view in various ways, including the Direct Cinema, and Cinema Verité movement, and even up to guys like Lars von Trier with his rather stringent Dogme manifesto. Because when you've mastered all other forms, the only way to challenge yourself is to give yourself artificial limits.

So do you morally have to say no to CG or photoshopping? Absolutely not. It's a tool like any other. You can use it to enhance the experience. And with todays digital cameras, it is often needed to glean the experience you had when watching the subject in real life, kind of like the expressionist painters of yore, who would strive to paint the feeling they had with the subject, rather than illustrate "the truth." Or you can willfully subject yourself to artificial limits, because it's a challenge.

With that said, I think the photos shown here reveals brilliant and inspired creativity with new techology and tools, and in the end, that's what it's about: To make something fantastic out of perhaps untraditional tools, either because it's a challenge, or because you have a grand vision—or both.

Anyway, I hope this gives you some inspiration to pick up your camera (any camera, even the one on your iPhone), and challenge yourself. All the best!

I was talking about cheap electronics to make the LED builds that make for cool blinky blinky things. OSS running on commodity hardware in the form of Arduino/Pi/etc allows for dependably repeatable motion control. For a few hundred dollars, you can make your camera appear to float and run all day on a single LiPo battery charge. You can literally make your camera fly with very affordable drones. You can buy BT/WiFi components so you control all of this with your phone. If you were a hacker 20 years ago, your inner youth would be drooling over this stuff.

(I don't say this to distract from the artistry, just to point out it's a well-known technique, and halos are on the more common side when painting with light)

If a few of these start trending on twitter/instagram/whatever, there will definitely be hundreds of people doing this.

It's already hard to enjoy a trip to many places without a "bbwweeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE" reverberating overhead.

But yes, this is an old technique. I guess the big difference is that drones can write shapes into the air and also reach locations and angles you can’t reach with traditional light painting.