My Light Painting experience

Light painting is what we all have been doing. Capturing light to make an image is a form of light painting. So to have hands on experience I attended a workshop.

This was sometime back in September 2012, the workshop was conducted by Jeff from the Melbourne Photography Workshops meetup which can be found here. It was aimed at taking long exposure shots while we used some form of light source.

The various available light sources were EL wires (which can be purchased on eBay), torches (they can be a bit too bright), LED's, steel wool (most used and my favourite), bike lights, sparklers (they do not last long, but make interesting patterns). Anything that produces light can be used for light painting. Experimenting with them is a lot of fun.

Light sources can be used by themselves to create interesting patterns or can be used along with a person to create some dramatic portraits.

A few things to remember when doing light painting. 

• Make sure that the ISO is as low as possible. 
• A tripod is a must. 
• A shutter release though not crucial its a good to have (without shutter release you have to make sure that you are comfortable to manually depress the shutter button for more than 2minutes). 
• A light source to help you focus (Manually focussing the camera is essential).
• An aperture at around 8.0 is good to get most of the elements in the image in focus.

Shutter: 90 Seconds, f8.0, ISO 200

This image was created as follows:

Light Source use: Green EL

We were a group of 3, one of us stood at a distance while the rest of us focused our cameras using a LED torch. The second person turned the EL wire ON. When the shutter was released, the EL wire was zigzagged around the person.

To get an even more dramatic photo, after the EL wire is zigzagged use a torch to trace the outline of the person. This will give a clear distinction between the green of the EL wire and the person standing.

Shutter: 25 Seconds, f10, ISO 250

This is a classic Steel wool shot. Jeff our workshop instructor was whirling the ignited steel wool and we were all happily snapping away. The trick what Jeff told us was to have a shutter speed that matched the length of the steel wool. So just a rough estimate of how long would the steel wool take to burn completely. If the shutter speed was more than the time taken by the steel wool to burn then we would be able to see the trail of the steel wool rather than an orb.

Shutter: 20 Seconds, f8.0, ISO 250

A few more examples of what we tried at the workshop.

 Shutter: 121 Seconds, f8, ISO 200

Shutter: 15 Seconds, f13, ISO250

Light-painting is a lot of fun. So start experimenting and let me know how you go!