HELLWOOD PUTTING LEAGUE

Feb 13

Hellwood is an 18-hole indoor disc golf putting league presented by Dellwood Disc Golf inside Illinois’ Number One Haunted House: HellsGate Haunted House. All of the details about this league can be found here, at Dellwood Disc Golf.

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This league was especially fun and challenging to photograph due to the limited light. Flash photography was not an option here because people were competing and using a flash would not be appropriate.

I really enjoyed the process of dreaming up ideas for photographs that would work here.

The first week I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. I ended up mostly walking around, exploring the place and just figuring out how everything was mapped out, while also taking videos on my phone.

Going into week two I had a better idea of what I wanted and I couldn’t wait to start painting those pixels in camera with the available light.

In the image below I used a copper pipe, approximately 1” in diameter by 2” long. I held this pipe up to my lens as I captured a long exposure. By doing this the light facing directly towards me reflected off of the inner sides of the pipe, and by moving it around during the exposure the effect looked like smoke in the 15 second exposure!

The room was also spinning here. It was a very narrow tunnel on a catwalk and the tunnel walls spin around you.

For this next image, I used the same techniques and settings I used above. The only thing that changed was I switched from my 24mm fixed lens to my 50mm. I find that when I use the copper pipe with my 50mm I get a greater ring of fire effect.

Every room was different. They had a morgue, stuffed animal hole with a giant teddy bear, a fern room, a slide hole, and lots of narrow hallway shots. The tunnel hole was by far my favorite to photograph because of its unique light conditions and spinning walls.

Due to the popularity of this league Dellwood added a glow edition flex start tournament where you can just show up and play during their available hours, you can find out more information here. The next Flex Glow event is on Saturday, February 26th.

Not to be confused with the Hellwood Putting League, which runs through March 4th. It is every Friday night starting at 7:00pm, signups are on Disc Golf Scene on the Tuesday before league at 7pm. Spots fill up fast!

The images below are from the glow event. This was the slide hole (with the slides being off left). Above the basket was a multi-colored light beam. I used the same technique in both images below as I did above, with the copper pipe.

To capture every beam of light, a 20 second exposure was necessary here since not all of the colors were always on at the same time (if they were on at the same time, it was not for very long and they did not stay in one place).

When you do a long exposure like that 20 seconds is ample time to paint the pixels in your camera’s sensor, in a similar scenario (or if you are using film).

I like to slow things down when I start painting. I only used the copper pipe here for a little bit, it wasn’t the full duration, or even half of it. I tried to mostly keep the pipe in one place (that is why you see the circular white light just to the right of the basket) and then I moved it around very slowly to paint the full frame.

In the photograph below, I did the opposite and I used the copper pipe for almost the entire duration, but it was only a 2 second exposure with a brighter and more intense light source.