About this limited edition photograph:

The light painted photograph “Pulpit Rock Visitors” was created at Pulpit Rock in Will Baker Park in Decorah, Iowa.

Pulpit Rock is a popular hiking destination in Decorah, Iowa. Featuring a scenic hiking trail and stone steps leading up a natural crack in the limestone face, this trail ultimately leads you to a beautiful view of both the city of Decorah and the towering Pulpit Rock formation below.

Serendipity: While I was light painting Pulpit Rock at 2 am, a dozen hikers came up the trail with their headlamps on. I stepped back into the shadows beside my camera to let them pass without seeing me or my camera, and then they walked up the stairs to the lookout above. Once they were out of sight I closed my camera’s shutter and captured their headlamp trails in my photograph.

I placed my Canon T3i camera on a tripod and used a long exposure of 261 seconds to create this light painted photograph. I used a powerful spotlight and two different colored gel filters to paint light onto the various rock surfaces to illuminate and add color to the scene. The serendipitous hiker’s headlamps did the rest.

This photograph came off my camera as-is, and involved zero post-processing or Photoshop.

Nocturnal Designs © 2013.