How do you go about photographing and “light painting” a 350-foot-long dragon serpent? There were also some problems to solve. I’ll reveal all the behind-the-scenes secrets and more of how I captured this giant dragon under the stars.
Admittedly, there’s a lot happening in this photo. You’ve got the enormous dragon serpent. You’ve got long streaks in the sky showing star movement. And somehow, the dragon itself is glowing just enough to show off all the incredible scales and detail—without looking garish. So, how did I pull it off?
What on Earth is ‘Light Painting’?
“Light painting” is often used loosely for adding light to a night photo. But technically, it means using a handheld light source to “paint” during a long exposure. Your flashlight is the brush, the scene is your canvas, and you decide what gets lit and what stays in the shadows. Night photographers have used this for decades.
Why do I love handheld light painting? Because it’s fast, flexible, creative, and ridiculously fun. No need for light stands, no heavy gear—it’s just you and your light shaping the scene.
How To Light a Dragon
Photographing a sculpture this massive takes more than just pointing a camera. I’ll walk you through the exact steps I took (and why my first attempt two years earlier totally flopped).
Step 1: Choosing the Right Lens
Most night shooters default to wide angles like 14mm or 15mm. They’re great for showing off the sky. But here, a wide lens would have meant getting uncomfortably close to the dragon’s head—distorting the perspective and making the long body look tiny.
Instead, I went with my “walkabout” lens: the Nikon AF-S NIKKOR 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR (no longer available). No, it’s not the fastest glass. But since I was shooting at f/8 anyway (thanks to a nearly full moon lighting up the desert), it didn’t matter.
A longer focal length also compresses the scene, pulling in not just the dragon’s body but also the mountains and stars behind it. Bonus: it makes the star trails look longer, faster. I say yessss!
Step 2: Nail the Vantage Point?
Lens choice alone won’t save you. Placement matters. I needed a view that showed the dragon’s full 350-foot length. Setting up on the right side of the dragon did the trick—it gave me the entire body plus a sky full of negative space, space that the dragon could “look into,” perfect for those star trails.
I backed up, zoomed in to 40mm, and smiled. That felt right. The body was in full view, all the way to the end of the tail. It looked like a great composition.
Step 3: “The Face Is Too Dark!”
I could see that there was one issue to solve already. From the vantage point I had chosen, the dragon serpent’s head was dark. This was because the moon was shining from the right-hand side. None of the light was falling on the left side of the head.
I decided to light the head from the left side. I often do not do this, as I prefer my light painting to come predominantly from the same side as the moon so that it feels more natural. But I really wanted the face illuminated, as I was enamored with the detail and felt it was important since the face was such a dominant part of the composition.
When I finally began the sequence of photos, I went to the left side, shielded my light with my body so it wouldn’t show in the photo just in case I was in the frame, and skimmed my light on the left side.
How do you walk 350 feet down the dragon’s body while painting it with light—without ending up in the photo or blasting the lens with your flashlight? After some thought, I arrived at two techniques.
Trick 1: Stay in Motion
Night photographers have a secret superpower: invisibility. As long as you keep moving during a long exposure, you won’t register in the frame. Stand still too long (10% or more of the total exposure), and you begin looking like a ghost in the photo. So I just kept walking, walking, walking…
Trick 2: Shield Your Light
To avoid shining into the lens, I kept the light (a ProtoMachines LED2 I had just bought) in my right hand, shielding it from the camera with my torso. As I walked, I moved the beam up and down to paint the scales evenly. Problem solved.
Step 5: How To Create Epic Star Trails
Lighting was the tricky part. Star trails? That’s surprisingly simple. All you need is a good base exposure and an intervalometer to shoot continuously without gaps.
My settings: 2 minutes at f/6.3, ISO 200 with a Nikon D610 DSLR. Each exposure gave me plenty of time to walk the dragon’s length and add light. I fired off 14 frames in a row—28 minutes total. Then I stacked them in Photoshop for that sweeping star-trail effect.
Bonus: if you want the exact step-by-step stacking method, I break it down in another Fstoppers article using this same photo!)
Learn From My Mistake!
I first photographed this dragon serpent in 2013. I used almost the same perspective. It looked amazing on the back of the camera. But when I got home and pulled it up on my computer, it was jagged, low-res, and basically unusable. I was devastated. What happened?
Turns out, I had brought my camera in for cleaning, and they had quietly reset everything to factory defaults. Without realizing it, I had shot the entire evening on a Nikon D90 (a whopping 12.1 MP!) using the “Normal JPG” setting instead of raw.
The good news? I went back in 2015, two years later, and recreated the photo that you see in this article. Lesson learned: always double-check your settings before shooting something epic.
About This Enormous Dragon Serpent Sculpture
This dragon serpent is not an AI creation. It actually exists. It’s a 350-foot-long metal sculpture in Borrego Springs, California, created by sculptor Ricardo Breceda. The serpent appears to dive in and out of the sand—and even crosses under a road. It’s one of the most surreal places you can photograph at night.
We bring our night photography workshop students here, as well as to Joshua Tree National Park. I do love the look on the participants’ faces when they see this dragon for the first time. And I love it even more when I see their faces light up when they see their own photos of the dragon serpent underneath the stars.