They're air traffic controllers by day, trained to think in three dimensions, to make split-second decisions, to keep their heads when others are losing theirs.

But when darkness descends, they turn their stress-meters off and transform into something peculiar, something startling to stumble upon in the night, something for maximum effect best said in a deep, ominous voice: Light Painters.

Brett Baker and Jim Buggy are two guys with intense jobs who unwind by making pictures in the dark. Two guys, two cameras, two tripods, a bunch of colored lights and a huge state with an abundance of rusted, dented, twisted, dilapidated, grounded, graffitied and bullet-ridden stuff to photograph.

In the winter. In the cold and dark.

Although Buggy is 47 and has 11 kids, and Baker is 26 and has a dog, they have some basics in common. Both have been doing photography for years and have photo businesses on the side. And both grew up in hot, sunny places, Buggy in Phoenix, Baker south of Los Angeles. Now that Alaska is home, whining about winter seems like a huge waste of time. Better to find a reason to embrace it. And this is how they do it.

While others are safely ensconced in their Snuggies, remote controls in hand, they're out there as night stalkers of derelict buildings, mangled machinery and trashed-out cars abandoned in the woods. Eyesores to most. Art to these two resurrectors of dead and dying deserted debris.

Through long, wide-open exposures and dousing subjects with flashes of colored light, they can make the cab of a deceased 1961 Pontiac Catalina glow ghastly green and the cockpit of a 1942 Air Force C-47A scream electric yellow.

Reds, blues, yellows and countless combinations of colors between.

The results give the places and possessions Alaskans use, abuse and abandon a vibrant and eerie pulse.

"We can put life back into them," Buggy says. "That's kind of what we do."

"This is something we can do outside of work that doesn't make us think anything about work," Baker said. "At no point when we're out on a shoot do we think about separating airplanes."

COLD and CREEPY

The Light Painters have light-painted everything from an old caboose to a 1952 Cadillac hearse to the Buckner Building in Whittier. They give their photographs names like "Twisted Tour Bus," "Target Practice," "Creepy Attic" and "Creepy Attic Made Even Creepier."

The Buckner was a classic. The place was so pitch dark, with their headlamps turned off, they could be standing a foot apart and not see each other; they could only hear each other breathe.

In its day, the five-story military building was a city under one roof, with everything from a bowling alley to a jail. It was deemed unsafe and abandoned after the 1964 Good Friday Earthquake.

Baker and Buggy wore respirators for that session, since the place is a wasteland of asbestos, mold, mildew, ice, peeling paint, dangling pipes, calcium deposits hanging stalactite-style from the ceiling and other hazards.

In other words, light-painter Nirvana. Strange and spooky.

Not as spooky, however, as one of the first places they light-painted -- an antique market in the Mat-Su area, a gold mine of old junk just sitting there alongside the road. The place had been closed a long time, but the owner had a neighbor watching over it, as they soon discovered.

"The guy's son happened to be driving by," Buggy says. " 'Dad, there's something going on over there; lights popping all over the place.' "

So the caretaker, his son and his son's friend came up over the hill above where the Light Painters were doing their thing. They came armed with a shotgun.

"And they were not small people," Baker said.

"They were wondering what we were doing," Buggy said. " 'We're, ahh, taking pictures?' 'Yeah, right; it's dark out here.' 'No really, we're taking pictures.' "

"We learned some really valuable lessons that night," Baker said.

The most important was to always get permission first.

This disqualifies these guys as urban explorers, also known as Urbex, urban spelunkers and building hackers. Urban explorers break into boarded-up buildings, mothballed industrial sites and other off-limits places to do photography or just look around. They risk getting arrested for trespassing, but they do it anyway because they find urban decay profoundly moving and beautiful.

"We like the urban exploration part," Baker said, who once hung upside down from some rafters to get light exactly where he wanted it. "But we like permission first. We are very much about getting permission before we enter a place."

HOW THEY DO IT

They've been at this a little over a year now. They call their first experiments in light painting "embarrassing."

In the beginning, like most light painters, they used flashlights with colored gels and films over the lenses to light up and paint selected areas in brilliant colors.

Now in addition to flashlights, they use remote flash units. Because exposures are so long, and winter nights so dark, they can walk right into a picture as it's being taken and add a bit more light or color to a certain feature. Although the camera sees them, they're not lit up enough to register. So it's like they're invisible.

With the remote units, they can stick a green flash in driver's seat of an abandoned car, a magenta one in the back, a teal one in the engine compartment, then light up the surrounding trees in red and give the headlights a dose of white light so it appears the car corpse is coming back to life.

"There is no book for this," Buggy says. "It's all learned on the fly. We've taught ourselves pretty much everything we do."

They started this as a hobby, something to help them look forward to in winter. But once they got good at it, they started thinking about doing more with their light paintings. They now have a Web site, Abandoned Alaska, where they post their pictures. And a coffee table book is in the works.

"People either say, "This is really cool,' or 'I don't get it,' " Buggy said. "We have one guy at work, every time he sees one of our new pictures, he goes, 'Yep. I still don't get it. Take a picture of a moose; I get that.' "

"Even my parents," Baker said. "They go, 'Who would buy that?' 'I say, 'That's a really good question.' "

They hope to someday find out.

Find Debra McKinney online at adn.com/contact/dmckinney or call 257-4465.

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