Light painting

The word "photography" means "light-drawing". In this blog we'll take a look at the literal translation of our favourite word: We are going to draw stuff with light!

To be able to do this, it needs to be dark. The darker the better. Also, we need to put the camera in manual mode. Next, dial in a slow shutter speed, like 15 or 20 seconds. If it's REALY dark you can even try 'bulb' mode, which means that the shutter will be open as long as you hold down the shutter release button (to avoid camera shake, better use a cheap cable release with which you you can 'lock' the release button).

Choose an ISO value which is not too high to avoid noise. The shutter will be open for a long time anyway so don't worry too much about not enough light falling into the camera.

Now choose an aperture that fits your needs. With a little bit of experimentation you'll get the correct setting. If the photo is too dark, just choose a lower f value to open the aperture some more. Too bright? Choose a higher f value to close the aperture.

You'll also need a light source of some kind. A flashlight or the led light on your phone will do perfectly fine. A model is not necessary, but it makes the photo's much more fun! (Don't forget to tell your model to stay perfectly still for as long as the shutter is open :-) ) And now for some examples:

f/22 t:20sec iso:1600

f/22 t:20sec iso:1600

At the location of these poto's there was a lamp post pretty near by. Because of this, the guy with the light (that would be me) is visible as a ghost-like figure. This would not have been the case if the surrounding lights were less bright, and wearing darker clothes would help as well. In a more ideal (darker) situation we would have opened the shutter, made the light painting, and then use a seperate flash on the model to make him/her visible in the photo. But since this was not the case, we thought of another solution. First we made the desired photo, with me as the light ghost (especially visible at the 'k' position of 'Frank').

f/7.1 t:20 sec iso:200

After this, we made another photo with the same camera settings but without the people in it.

f/7.1 t:20 sec iso:200

Then, in Photoshop (any advanced photo editor will do) these two photo's were combined so that the ghost appearance was removed.

Combined image (also cropped)

The light paintings above were made with a little led light that was available on my phone. The downside of using a led/flashlight is that the person holding that light needs to be in the image. This might cause some ghosting if there is too much surrounding light. To avoid problems like that, you could also use a laser, as can be seen in the following examples:

f/3.5 t:10sec iso:320

f/3.5 t:10sec iso:125

Making light paintings is a lot of fun! Try different light sources like leds, lasers and flashlights. You could even attach them to a rope and swing them arround to create cool effects. I allready bought some glowsticks for the next session :-)

Here are some more, very cool, examples from a Finnish photographer called Janne Parviainen: http://9bytz.com/light-paintings-made-by-a-single-led/