Photographer Captures Halos Above Rock Pinnacles Using Drones

 

REUBEN WU



Picture taker Reuben Wu is a pioneer of utilizing LEDs mounted to automatons to light scenes during the evening, and his undertaking Lux Noctis is loaded with dazzling and abnormal photographs made utilizing this strategy. 

He is a photographer from Chicago has been wowing us for years with his innovative landscape photography. By attaching LED lights to a drone, he's able to capture incredible images of the natural world from above. With the lights casting a haunting glow across rock formations, his Lux Noctis series has been incredibly well received. And now, he's taking things up a level by using long exposures to “paint” halos over rock pinnacles.

All the more as of late, Wu has included yet another innovative touch: he includes coronas over the stone apexes on emotional scenes by flying the automatons in hovers amid long-presentation photographs. 


“The circles are actual light paths of the modified drone I used to light the landscapes,” Wu tells PetaPixel.
“In some of these images, I’ve evolved my process of intervention where I show the light source in the form of a light path,” Wu writes. “I see it as a kind of ‘zero trace’ version of land art where the environment remains untouched by the artist and at the same time is presented in a way which is inspired by 19th-century sublime Romantic painting and science and fictional imagery.”

By pushing drone photography into the fine art realm, Wu demonstrates that creative thinking can help photographers break out of the standard aerial landscape photography we're used to. “It’s so easy to become numb to conventional depictions of beautiful nature. In casting a new, unfamiliar light, I want people to see that while other planets are fascinating and incredible to us through the eyes of spacecraft and rovers, it is our own planet which has so much grandeur and beauty which is both accessible to us and worthy of preservation and protection.”



Here's a short video demonstrating Wu's light automaton flying in hovers over the zenith in the photograph above:

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