Diwali is one of my favorite holidays here in India. Not only is it the festival of lights and fireworks, its kind of the Hindu new year and a great time to party!
For Grabhouse it meant that the design team had a chance to wish everyone a happy diwali with their own design.
You can see them here:

And some cute videos on some DIY diwali gifts:
http://grabhouse.com/urbancocktail/uc-browsers-diwali-video-trending-fun-thing-youll-watch-festival/

So for my Diwali greeting i wanted to get a portrait that would capture the essence of the happy times that Diwali brings, for me it’s all about lights and fireworks and smiles. So i asked the very pretty Shobita from the office if we could try some things. My idea was to have her holding a sparkler and getting smoke and a glamorous image. Shooting fireworks or fire, or basically anything that is an organic light source will be hard to capture correctly. If you know the color temperature of the sparkler perhaps you can have a better idea on what shutter speed you should be using. But for these sparklers trial and error was the only way to go.

Shobita managed during our long exposure testing to write Grabhouse with the sparkler:

Light painting really is an art, i’ve been dabbling with this before and it really is a skill to be learned. You can see an older example of what i’ve done here with the light painter Dda Terdeaone.

https://www.instagram.com/p/q8vkO-SKhp
So after the long exposure testing, we needed to see how much light we can get from the sparkler alone.

The sparklers had different colors and that rendered differently on skin so in the end i settled on the green sparkler. That would also burn intensely enough for me to have a shutter speed above 60/s

A little bit of bounce from the front and the light also became a little bit softer.
Then it was just some post processing to be done and a nice border with text:

Really happy with the result and thank you Shobita for being so patient.

And as a conclusion to this post, my love and memories goes out to the best dog “Diwali”, who was found on the day of the festival, hence the name, and who tragically left us early.