There was a time when I was doing a lot of painting with light, that is to say that I would leave the shutter open for extended periods while I used a flashlight and a few colored filters to literally paint the scene with light, selectively illuminating and coloring different areas. This was the first image I made with that technique.

I was in Joshua Tree, California, camping for New Year's Eve and had the idea to use the three light primary colors of red, blue and green to paint some boulders for an abstract composition. I ended up with what you see above in "Colors, Forms, and Space." For the colors, I used green plastic from a soda bottle, a scrap of red plastic, and the blue lid to a water bottle. I shined my flashlight through these to light the boulders.

The diagonal streaks are stars, the shutter having been left open for an hour or more. The two streaks moving in a slightly different diagonal were from an airplane.

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