Ivan Lucio is a light painting photographer from Madrid, Spain.
Also Ivan is a member and founder of the firm Riders of Light.
According to his site, he has not a very marked style but the discipline that he most often work with is the Light Painting Portrait.
Why have you chosen light painting?
What I like the most about light painting are 2 things:
- Their creative possibilities have no end;
- Working at night and in abandoned places is always a fun adventure.
Your light paintings are rather complex. What sources of light do you use for their creation? Which of them are your favorite?
I use a wide variety of tools, lately I have been working a lot with tubes and fibers but I usually use many more, now I am very happy with the new Light Paintern Ryu flashlight, it has almost 30 different strobe modes and many functions designed for the Light Painters.
What exposure time do you need to create such painting?
Each photograph has a different time but in no case are they short times of 5 or 10 seconds, the normal thing in my work is several minutes, sometimes 1 or 2 or sometimes 7 or 8 even longer exposures like 20 or 30 minutes.
People are rather sharp at your images. How do you achieve it?
When I work with people there are very important things to take into account such as the speed of lighting, I adapt the camera parameters so that my tools are powerful enough to illuminate the model very quickly.
Could you tell us about your favorite tricks?
I do not have special tricks but if I have aspects that I take care of a lot, I give a lot of importance to the combination of colors, there are photographs that are simply impressive for their colors beyond the scene or landscape.
Do you allow yourself to edit your images or prefer to draw everything in a single shot?
All my works are in a single shot, I never use photoshop editing to mount several images or to erase or clone or change things, my photographs only have basic adjustments of saturation, brightness, contrasts and little else, doing it this way is always a challenge and that motivates me a lot.
How do you generate ideas for the new images?
Inspiration comes from the location in which I work or the style of the model, I also look for a lot of inspiration from other photographers and from cinema, comics and art in general.
Do you imagine the result at the beginning?
Normally I always imagine how the final result is going to be and I go with that idea to execute it but when working with light, you don’t always end up doing it the same, sometimes it doesn’t turn out the way you want but sometimes you end up doing something much better than what you had. thought at first.
What is really important in photography for you?
The most important thing for me is always that I like it, that I am satisfied with what I did, I don’t think about much more than having fun and doing work that I like, I’m a bit of a maniac with compositions and also when I make strokes of light I like that they all make sense, not move tools without more and see that it goes crazy.
I think, there are some photographers who inspire you. Can you tell us about these people?
Well, I like a lot of photographers and I like a certain quality of each one, for example:
- Tom Hill, loved his symmetries and technique
- Mart Barras, I love his creativity
- Hannu Huhtamo, I love the beauty and cleanliness of her works
- Dario Cuesta, his lighting technique is perfect
I could name you many more but we will not finish the interview.
Do you participate in any exhibitions or contests?
Yes, I have participated together with my partner from Riders of Light in numerous exhibitions worldwide
China, New York, Dallas, Paris, Madrid and many more and I have also participated in some contest, not long ago I won a 2nd prize in a night photography and Light Painting contest and I got a great flashlight, Led Lenser MT18 that is always in my backpack
Is photography your main work?
Not fortunately, these are complicated times for this job, I am a train conductor in Metro of Madrid as my main job and photography is my second job, I do a workshop, masterclass and I also have a very successful product, the Photocall Light Painting for all kinds of events
What are you going to do next?
My next project is a session in the snow with star wars models, tomorrow is the session.
