How a Lightsaber Created My Best Work

Look closer, and you'll see that this wasn't captured in a studio. That's a pickleball court.

If you ever find yourself with the opportunity to photograph one of your dream cars at midnight, this one's for you. As an amateur photographer with a professional opportunity, I took a risk that resulted in some of my proudest work. I was able to capture one of my dream cars and got results that surpassed my expectations.

It was a chilly December night in 2023. I wasn’t really tasked with it so much as offered the favor of an incredible subject: the Superformance MKIII Cobra, a replica of the legendary 1965 Shelby model. It had just rained and I couldn't fire up the car without waking up every neighborhood in the county, so I rolled it out of the garage and into an expansive driveway. I set up my camera on a tripod and took a moment to figure out how I was going to take a photo that could possibly capture such a beautiful machine. There it sat, almost invisible, in darkness.

The only source of light nearby was a flood light on the garage. I flipped it on and still lacked sufficient illumination. In search of more light, I had the idea to position my truck so that its headlights would shine on the Cobra. As I go in to move it, an item in my back seat caught my eye. There sat a hilarious 19th birthday present gifted to me by my best friends: a $120 lightsaber.

A forgotten lesson of my high school photography class suddenly came to mind. I turned off all other sources of light, turned the lightsaber to blue, and set my camera's shutter speed to 30 seconds. I was going light-painting.

It's important to note that my camera at the time was a Facebook Marketplace-sourced Sony A7 III paired with a lens that had a 3.5 aperture at the sharpest. It was a solid starter camera, but a shoot like this could be recreated with gear worth half as much. This shoot came down to composition and editing. I didn't even know if my photos were going to be useable until post-processing.

Initially, I struggled to manipulate my lines as I wanted them to appear. The faster I swung the saber, the more transparent the light would appear, and the more upright I held it the thicker the lines would be. There were a number of shots where I hid the car too much behind my lines or I stood too still, getting caught in the photo. After many takes and much patience, I started to get the hang of it.

The results were stronger than anything I’d produced to that point. In fairness, I struck gold with both subject and setting, but the compositions were mine. I proudly shared my work on Instagram, and the photos quickly became my laptop background, pinned post, and profile picture. To my delight, Superformance shared them on its Instagram page. That shoot reminded me of the thrill of chasing creative ideas.

I suppose the goal of writing this is to encourage you, reader, to think outside the box and trust what you know. Sometimes the most unconventional idea leads to the greatest creativity. Keep those wild ideas in your back pocket—or your back seat.