The Ohanaware Weblog
Light Painting – Experiment and how you can do it too.
Light Painting as dubbed by some, is a great new photography technique whereby people take long exposures and flash lights around while doing so. There’s a bunch of examples all over the internet and a couple of guides. We didn’t read any of the guides and tried to do it ourselves the other night.
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Not bad for our first attempt, I don’t think. There’s plenty more examples not made by us over at this Flickr group. http://www.flickr.com/groups/lightpainted/
How to do light painting
Like I said above, light painting is a relatively simple photography method, but be waned it can be addictive and take a while to get used to it.
You’ll need:
- A digital camera
- A tripod or bean bag, or something to keep the camera solid while it takes the long exposure
- A least one flashlight/torch
- Optional: An interesting night shot for the background.
- So to get started, set-up your camera on it’s tripod ( or whatever ). Depending on your camera, you may want to switch it to a starry sky mode, to shutter priority or to manual mode. I personally use manual mode, whereby I can specify an aperture and shutter speed. If you can set the ISO as low as it’ll go (to reduce noise). I like to get about 20-30 seconds (although you can do longer if you wish). On my camera the Starry Night mode, works, okay, but I prefer the manual control.
- Next, shoot a photo so that you can clearly see what the background looks like and to get an idea of what’s in the frame and what isn’t. On our early attempts, we didn’t do this and therefore a lot of it was out of frame.
- Once you’ve got your photo, know where your boundaries are. Get the camera ready to take the shot and enable the timer. I personally use 2 seconds, although 10 seconds is fine. The idea is to basically avoid any camera shake from pressing the button.
- Now the fun bit, the light painting. Imagine that your flash light is an electronic paint brush. You click it on to paint and click it off to stop, this means that when you want to remove the brush from the page, you have to switch it off, and when you want to start painting again, you need to switch it back on. it can take some practice, but you’ll get the hang of it.
And that’s it for this part of the tutorial as we practice some more, we’ll give you some more tips. Have fun and enjoy light painting.
Some more Flickr Groups
http://www.flickr.com/groups/light-paint/
http://www.flickr.com/groups/341097@N23/
Oh, and once you’ve finished and uploaded your photos onto your computer, you can use Funtastic Photos to edit them, share them or print them out! http://www.ohanaware.com/funtasticphotos/
Tags: Camera, Digital, light, Light Painting, painting, Photography
June 21st, 2010 at 6:26 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Sam Rowlands, Sam Rowlands. Sam Rowlands said: Just posted a 'How To' on 'Light Painting', Where you use a flash light/torch to 'paint' a picture on your camera! http://bit.ly/bRpRBg [...]