Normally I'm not a big fan of light painting or artificial light intruding into a scene but in this case the reason for the artificial light is pretty unique and it worked out quite well. Some friends and I were shooting the night sky at Hollow Rock in Grand Portage, MN and noticed that there was a boat working its way down the shoreline. The boat had quite a few lights on it. As it got closer I realized it was the boat used by the tribal natural resource department to shock fish. Electro-shocking or electro-fishing is a common scientific survey method used to sample fish populations to determine abundance, density, and species composition. When performed correctly, electrofishing results in no permanent harm to the fish, which return to their natural state in as little as two minutes after being caught.
At any rate, they were sampling fish along the Lake Superior shoreline on this night and were working very close to the shoreline. The boat passed very close to the back side of Hollow Rock, then worked its way around the rock to the side we were shooting from. Then, it turned and continued down the shoreline. As it moved away from the rock, its lights illuminated the rock very nicely. The light was nice and soft and made for a very "natural" looking illumination of the rock. By natural I mean that the colors looked like how the rock looks in the daytime. It sure was a unique set of circumstances in how this image came to be, and I really like the end result.
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