Caterpillar CS54B Steamroller
Here’s a quick story about how I created a cool light painted photograph of a Caterpillar CS54B Steamroller! This beast was at rest after a busy day in our daughter’s neighborhood getting ready to build homes right down the street from their house. After seeing it there a few times, I decided it needed its picture taken, light painting style! This piece of heavy equipment is owned and operated by North Pine Aggregate in Forest Lake, MN.
Here’s the Caterpillar CS54B Steamroller, sitting next to a bulldozer. Since I couldn’t get the entire bulldozer in the light painting, I opted to leave it out of the finished image.
I’d already light painted several other pieces of heavy construction equipment, but no steamrollers. This was the perfect opportunity to remedy that situation! The idea here was to gain valuable practice with my light painting skill set and add some more cool pieces of construction equipment to my arsenal for adding kids to them safely in post-production. So, if you have a kid who loves construction equipment, I’m the guy that can place them in a cool photograph for their bedroom, or for above your fireplace.
There’s So Much More To See!
If you like what you see here, please check out our dedicated light painting website at MichaelAndersonLightPainting.com. There are tons of cool light paintings of construction equipment, police cars and fire trucks, cool aircraft, restaurants, and other goodies, lots of Corvettes, and many, many other really cool cars, trucks, and motorcycles of all types!
Taking Artistic License
The night that I created this light painting, they had a bulldozer sitting close to the steamroller. At the time, I really only wanted the steamroller (in hindsight, I probably should have light painted both). So I decided to edit the bulldozer out in post-production.
Then, there were the homes in the background. Nope, didn’t want those in the shot either. Gone. Thankfully, I’ve light painted piles of dirt for this very purpose (yes, I really have). Pretty sure that I might be the only photographer in the world that has light painted piles of dirt! You gotta do what ya gotta do to get the job done!
Here is the final light painting of the Catapillar CS54B Steamroller (less the homes and bulldozer).
A Caterpillar CS54B Steamroller – The Movie
As always, I have a short video on our YouTube channel that shows some of the images I used to create this one-of-a-kind light painted photograph. Thank you for reading our post, and have a great day! – M&J