Light-Painting

Light-painting is a fun and simple photography technique based on slow shutter photography. Pop open the shutter for a long time i.e. for more than a second in a darkly lit surrounding and move a hand-held source of light e.g. flashlight/phone flash and draw patterns to expose your camera to a beautiful photo! The wikipedia entry also mentions about moving the camera instead of the light source but I feel that technique is better described as Intentional Camera Movement (ICM). Here are the steps to light-paint:

1. Setup the camera on a tripod.
2. The camera will face problem focussing properly later in the dark when we start painting, so we will setup the correct focus first and switch to manual focus so that the camera focus remains unaltered. Stand at the place where you will light paint and use a remote control or ask someone to half-press the camera to let AF do it’s thing. Once correctly focused, let’s switch to manual focus and we’re all set.
3. Now we will setup the camera settings. We need to shift to manual exposure and set a long exposure of a few seconds or more. For the attached photograph, I used an exposure of 30 seconds. Shutter speed needs to be varied based on how long will it take to draw the pattern. We will vary the other parameters (F or ISO value) for the correct exposure.
4. Switch off the room light and that’s it, we are all set. Time to light-paint.
5. Trigger the camera and paint in the air to your heart’s content. Have fun!

We used our phone’s flash to light-paint this time and finally, Jayeeta helped me post-process in Photoshop to add color to each pattern but black and white light-paintings are equally awesome! Before I end, I will refer a few fellow photographers who are great with this technique.

I follow the work of Danny Turcotte of Catch Light Photography who specializes in light-photography. Recent works by Mathew Johnson were also lot of fun! Jayeeta’s photographs are here.