HOW I DEVELOPED THIS NIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY STYLE OF MINE? – A TRUE ONE OF A KIND STYLE back in 2010\

Painting the Dark: How I Developed My Signature Night Style

Back in 2010, while most photographers in the Central Australian outback were stuck shooting predictable star trails or leaving the desert floor as a pitch-black, lifeless silhouette against the Milky Way, I wanted something more. I found standard nightscapes boring. I wanted to show both the breathtaking cosmos and the mysterious beauty of the land itself in a single frame.

That drove me to a realization: I was the very first person in Central Australia to come up with the idea of actively using a flashlight to illuminate and highlight the landscape.

Operating in total pitch darkness across the Red Centre, I abandoned digital shortcuts and automated tricks. Instead, I used an old tungsten Maglite to manually paint the ancient red rock walls, abandoned structures, and trees during a long exposure. To combat color errors, I taped orange daylight filters over the glass.

I might not be the global inventor of light painting as a technique, but I am proud to claim my spot as the absolute first pioneer in Central Australia to bring this concept to the outback—merging raw single-shot integrity and manual torch-light chiaroscuro under the southern stars. It wasn’t about adding digital clutter; it was about waking the sleeping desert up from the dark.

HOW I DEVELOPED THIS TECHNIQUE AND SKILL

The Outback Pioneer Let’s get one thing straight: I might not be the global inventor of light painting as a technique, but around 2010, I was the absolute first person in the Central Australian outback to come up with the idea of actively using a flashlight to illuminate and highlight the landscape. While everyone else was shooting predictable star trails or leaving the desert floor as a pitch-black, lifeless silhouette against the Milky Way, I wanted something more. I wanted to show both the breathtaking cosmos and the mysterious beauty of the land itself in a single frame. In total pitch darkness, using an old tungsten Maglite with taped-on orange daylight filters, I manually painted the ancient red rocks and outback trees. I pioneered that regional style from scratch.

How did I manage to develop this and continually improve my skills in total darkness while maintaining strict compositional rules? By needing insanely challenging tasks to keep my hyperactive brain occupied—whether in the desert with the nearest town 490 km away, or back here in the Netherlands.

Close your eyes. Put your hands over them. See how pitch black it gets? That’s how dark the Outback nights are in the Centralian Desert near Alice Springs. With zero humidity, it’s one of the best stargazing spots on earth. And I was lucky enough to live there for 12 years.

ADAPTING TO THE OUTBACK

When I moved to Australia on April 29, 2006, for love (now my ex), I had to acclimatize to a completely alien world compared to the wet, cold Netherlands. Everything was literally reversed: seasons flipped, day and night flipped, dry climate versus wet.

The sun and moon don’t move via the south like in Holland; they move via the north to the west. The moon even looked “upside down,” showing a “baby face” instead of the familiar northern face because I was physically south of the equator. After three years of driving on the left and speaking Aussie English, my brain finally flipped too. Mentally, the hardest part was adjusting my biological clock to a region with no Daylight Savings Time—crucial because over 30% of Indigenous people in the NT live there, and changing clocks twice a year ruins their natural balance.

Once settled, I scouted every National Park online using Google Earth, noted GPS coordinates, and revisited spots in total darkness to lock in my vision.

CONCEPTUAL THINKING & EXECUTION

Every photo I take starts with a finished concept in my head, born from a neurodivergent brain that works in overdrive. Combined with 4 years of art history and color theory at university—knowing how sunlight Kelvin values differ from Australia to Europe—composition and precision became second nature.

Living in the outback taught me not to fear the silence, my own thoughts, or absolute darkness. It enabled me to develop a lighting technique to “see” in the dark, compose flawlessly, and focus just before infinity.

I taught myself digital photography from scratch, studying moon phases, the Milky Way, and the Southern Cross—ignoring star trails because I wanted raw, single-shot integrity. Only between nocturnal sunset and moonrise would I head out bush.

BACK IN THE NETHERLANDS

And now, after moving back in 2018, I’m capturing the dark here too. It’s a nightmare compared to the Outback: massive light pollution, hardly any open skies, and 6x to 8x more ambient light to deal with. But when someone dared tell me it’s impossible to capture a starry night sky in the Netherlands, I took the challenge. 1-0 for Joycie.

Out of the blue, after entering the National Geographic competitions years prior, my photographs of Johnny, the Indigenous elder, and us camping out bush didn’t just get printed in the 2022 National Geographic Calendar—they also landed feature spots in National Geographic Traveller Magazine Nederland! BOOM. That was a pretty sweet surprise.

Practice makes perfect. To be continued on my DUTCH NIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY PAGE.