About Jeff:
Jeff lives just outside New York City in New Jersey where he spends his weekends (and some weeknights) shooting night photography around the globe. He uses a Canon 5D Mark IV for most of his work but enjoys film with with a Hasselblad 500CM and Ondu 6x12 pinhole camera which he shoots monochrome. For Impossible/Polaroid work the Polaroid 680 SLR is a personal favorite due to its ability to take long-exposure shots.
Night photography gives him a chance to see the world differently - to focus on the quiet solitude of light and shadow and the beauty of textures, varying color pallettes, and forms. The spaces are quiet, and the solitude gives time to sit and observe light during long exposures and to see a different world than the one we normally see in full-spectrum daylight.
His photographic work has been greatly influenced by a number of people along the way, from artists such as Monet, Cezanne, Hopper, Adams and Evans to contemporary photographers like Tom Paiva, Troy Pavia, Christopher Payne, Stanley Greenberg, Lance Keimig, Joe Reifer, and Light Art Performance Photography. Jeff's current fascinations include dark skies, Natural Parks, and great star points for light painting (hopefully all three). He hopes you enjoy his work.
Please feel free to check out his work at his facebook page or at his etsy store and if you need some light modifiers or some of his books you can check out his store here.
About light painting:
Shooting at night creates a special challenge for photographers. Images that capture the stars often leave the land in darkness. Very long-exposure shots (lasting several minutes) expose the land properly but turn the stars into trails of light as they move around the North Star - an interesting but not always desirable effect.
For the last few years, I have been exploring a technique called "light painting" in my night photography, which involves selecting certain elements of the foreground and "painting" those elements with flashlights during a shot that lasts no more than a few moments. This allows for interesting experiments with angles of light, and is a means to draw the viewer's attention to different portions of the image, the way a painter might highlight elements of a painting. Rather than Photoshopping together my images, I can use this technique to capture the stars the way they really were at a particular time and place.
You can review the examples to the right to see what adding lighting can do to an image.
Image 1: Properly exposed for star points the shed is too dark.
Image 2: Properly exposed for the shed the stars become lines.
Image 3: Properly exposed for star points the shed then lit via addiional flashlights for a complete image.