Lightpainting

Today I write about an interesting form of photography. The light painting! I want to talk about two different types of light painting. It is not that difficult, but there are a few steps you need to do the job great.

Location

It's important, that you are in a dark place. This could be a dark room in your apartment or in the night in a forest. The darker the environment, the better the result. Because every little light spot rays and could destroy the picture.

Equipment

You need a DSLR Camera with manual settings and a bulb mode. If you use a bulb as shutter speed, you need a remote trigger. Of course, you need a tripod and different flashlights. If you don't have any flashlights, you can use your smartphone screen. Google "yellow", "blue", "red" or any other color and go to images. This is the easiest way to use your smartphone screen as a colored light.

Camera Settings

Both light painting types use the same camera settings. If your camera supports the RAW format, use it. In the dark it's difficult to find the focus. Try to make a manual focus or use the automatic focus if the object is bright enough. The next step is the ISO. The lower the ISO the better the result and lower is the noise in your photo. But if the photo is too dark and you can't set a longer shutter speed, you have to set a higher ISO. The time you set as the shutter speed, is the time you have to draw with your lights.

How to paint with the light?

The first way of light painting is to color an object. Like in this picture I had a flower and in the room was no light. I started with a shutter speed of 8 seconds. I used a blue picture on my smartphone screen and started to color the flower. After a few seconds I changed the color to red and painted another part of the flower. Check out my example.

Another way to paint with light is to paint something in the air. You can write your name or a number. In the first example I tied a flashlight to a cord and let it swing around the flowers. For the second example, I draw some curves around the flower with a flashlight. The results are always interesting. It's a special form of photography, because you take a picture of something you can't see.

I tried to explain you this type of photography in this post. Please leave some comments with your experience and what do you think about this post. Is it too much information or do you need more? My idea is to show you new stuff in a few sentences.