In August, I was contacted by Mounds View City Administrator Nyle Zikmund. He asked me if I would be able to create an image that would highlight the tribute park at night. I’m pretty sure he had no idea at the time just exactly how qualified we are to create cool nighttime photography of things. That would soon change.

The very evening of the phone call, I hopped in the car and drove over to City Hall. There, I met with Don Peterson, the Director of Public Works/Parks & Rec, and our Chief of Police, Ben Zender. They talked about what they had in mind to highlight the park’s features when they look their best, at night.

Simply taking a single photo in the dark would yield a very black background and very bright (and probably blown out) lighted areas. This was a perfect job for light painting! After explaining the light painting process, both Don and Ben gave the thumbs up to the idea!

• First Responders: Features dedicated granite tablets honoring EMS, firefighters, and police officers.

• Military Branches: Features a circular arrangement of granite tablets for each branch of service with central benches and individual flags flown behind each branch marker.

• Local Tragedies: The space includes dedicated markers remembering those impacted by historical local and regional events, including the 1965 tornado, the 1986 Williams Pipeline explosion, and the 2008 I-35W bridge collapse.

• Dedication Pavers: Community members can purchase personalized commemorative pavers to honor loved ones.

Light-Painting the Mounds View Tribute Park

A few weeks passed, and I had several projects to get done that involved vehicles and needed to get those completed before the fall weather arrived. Once I had a good handle on those, I contacted Nyle with a possible date that might work well if Mother Nature cooperated. And she certainly did! Nice and dry with little wind.

I arrived about an hour before sunset to set up my gear. Nyle and special guest, Mounds View City Council Member, Sherry Gunn, met me in the park. Nyle was aware that I would need assistance that night, but Sherry had no idea that by being there, she would be an integral part of the process too!

Sherry would be the “Trigger Girl”, firing the camera for me while I ran around lighting everything in the dark! Nyle wore multiple hats that night. More on that in a moment.

Getting 8 Flags “Flying”

As you can see, 8 flags are flying in this photograph – and I said there was very little wind that night. Since limp flags are not all that impressive, I brought my RYOBI leaf blower with me to get the flags to “fly”.

Nlye’s first “hat” that night was to use the leaf blower to get the flags moving. While he was doing that, I did my best to time taking exposures with the flags “flying” using a powerful strobe to light and freeze them. We photographed each flag, one at a time, until Sherry and I thought we had a winner. Then we moved to the next one, until we had each one covered. Then, we moved on to the rest of the scene.

This is when Sherry started wearing her “Trigger Girl” hat, and Nyle got to wear a new one, “Chief Communications Guy”! You see, the Mounds View Tribut Park is right there on busy County Road 10, and the passing traffic there is pretty loud. It made communicating when to fire the camera and when to stop very challenging.

After a short time, Nyle knew we were struggling, so he took it upon himself to get in the middle of Sherry and me to shout instructions to both of us. It worked very nicely, thank you, Nyle!

Mounds View Tribute Park – The Movie

As you probably know by now, after each light-painting project, I created a short “Build Video” for our YouTube channel that demonstrates the process. The link to view it is below.

Sherry, Nyle, and I took 234 images that night, many of which were of the sky as the sun set, and a whole lot more of them were the hit-and-miss attempts to photograph “flying” flags! In post-production, I ended up using just 36 of those 234 images, but it took 80 individual layers to create the final artwork.

A huge thank you to Sherry and Nyle for your assistance that night. I’m pretty sure both of you were pretty entertained! Thank you!

“Mounds View Tribute Park” © 2026 Michael Anderson Photography