So I am working on finishing my Bachelors in Digital Photography and for the last 5.5 weeks one of my classes has been Special Topics 1, which has been all about Light Painting. Light Painting is all about doing long exposures at night and then using a light source to “paint” into your photo.
Although I love shooting long exposures, I had never tried light painting before this class and you can create some beautiful images with this technique but it takes a LOT of practice especially if you want to write out words in your images. You have to remember where you started and stopped
each character of what you are trying to write and you also have to write backwards unless you plan on flipping your final image in Lightroom to back it read correctly to the viewer. In this first image I was shooting an abandoned house in my neighborhood and I was finally able to successfully
write the word “Hi”.
I know it’s nothing spectacular but I still had fun shooting this one for my assignment along with many others for the overall shoot. The only thing that spoiled it was I had wanted to do like a haunted house kind of look and bought a fog machine with colored LED lights on Amazon but it was defective
right out of the box so it kind of spoiled the shoot as far as that goes.
I also did some shoots using some of my power tools and I want to do Commercial photography so I played around with using my Milwaukee M12 Circular saw as well as my Milwaukee M12 T-50 stapler and mixed in some colored light using my Litra Torches and their colored filter kits to create
red, blue and green lighting as well as some white using a small flashlight.
I will probably continue to play with Light Painting off and on as I have time as you can create some really unique artwork by combining lights with your photography in long exposure, For best results you want to use ISO 100 and whatever shutter speed it right for the lens you are using and then set your camera
to BULB mode or put it in Manual and then set the shutter time to 20-30 seconds. One thing to remember is if you want to keep yourself out of the images, move quickly and wear all black so it is easier for you to blend into the darkness. If you want to see some of the really cool things you can do with Light
Painting, just check out these 100 examples.