Light Painting

Recently I've come to really enjoy Light painting. Whats light painting you say? Allow me to elaborate: Light painting is when you take a picture of yourself or someone else drawing images with light. If done right it can look like you have honed the mighty power of Zeus himself and can hurl lighting bolts at anyone you choose! Ok, that might be a stretch but it actually is really amazing and is really easy for even a novice photographer to do.

First your gonna need to find a dark space with very little to no light in the room. The less light you have the better this will work. Then your going to need to find a camera with a manual shutter feature that you can set to the "bulb" setting which is going to be the slowest shutter speed. What your gonna look for here is usually a little M next to all the other camera settings like automatic or motion capture settings. Most of those little cameras people tote around in there purses or back pockets don't have this setting so your gonna need to find a fairly advanced camera to do this.

When you have the bulb setting as your shutter speed this means that you shutter is going to be open the entire time you have your finger pressed on the capture button. What this allows the camera to do is it lets the camera absorb all the light in the room. But wait, there is no light in this room for the camera to absorb! Well not yet anyway.

The next thing you need to do is find a tripod, some sort of controllable light source (I suggest a small LED flashlight), and someone to take the picture. Once you all that prepped you can begin light painting. Go into the dark room with the camera all set up and stand in front of it. Have your photographer hold down the photo capture button down and then turn on the flashlight and draw and image with the light source facing the camera. Your going to want to be somewhat quick with your drawing because have a light source pointed a the camera for too long with white out your image and nothing will show up. When your done drawing turn off the light and have the other person let go of the button. What you should see in the photo is luminous lines drawn in the air. Hopefully it looks something like the image below.

Now that you know the basics lets talk about aperture. The aperture controls the size of the hole that lets the light into the open shutter. In relation to light painting the smaller the hole the longer you get to draw. With a bigger hole your going to accept light from the outside more rapidly and before you know it your going to have an image that all blurry and whited out.  My knowledge of your specfic camera is very limited but to adjust the aperture on mine I find this little -/+ button and then use the shutter speed scroll knob to adjust the size of the opening. Now apertures go against common logic with sizes and the numbers associated with the size. When you adjust the size you must remember the bigger the number the smaller the opening or hole. So lets say your camera ranges from a 5.6 opening to 22, the 22 is going to be the smaller opening and thus will allow you more time to draw.

But don't just settle for drawing with light, get creative! Have someone behind the camera flash the light on you for a small period of time so that only you show up in the image then move positions and have them shine the light on you again before you let go of the capture button the image should turn out a little like this one below.

So now that you understand the basics of light painting get out there and paint the world!