Light painting tutorial
a short article to show how easy is to create an image by painting with light
In this light painting tutorial , you are assumed that have reasonable knowledge of night photography and you have the basic understanding of long exposure at night time. The idea is to set your camera on a tripod in manual mode for a long exposure, and after that use a mobile source of light on a subject, or create artistic and interesting lighting effects rotating a light source , flash light for a example.
The results can be very different, depending on the aperture, shutter speed and ISO you want to use. We have conducted an experiment and this is what we have shot, during a trial and error exercise.
Obviously we have mounted the camera on a tripod, used a remote trigger in order to avoid any camera shake, and exposed gradually for 10, 20, 30 seconds. If the image was to dark, we have increased the aperture size and if the image was overexposed, we have made the aperture smaller.
![painting with light 2]( "painting with light 2")
- 30 seconds, F11, ISO 200
![painting with light 3]( "painting with light 3")
- 30 Seconds, F8, ISO 250
If you can see above, using a flash off the camera, from an angle, you can see the photographer as well lit.
![painting with light]( "painting with light")
- 30 sec, F9.5, ISO 640
Again, using an off camera flash, you can see only the silhouette of the photographer rotating the flash light with a piece of string
![painting with light]( "painting with light")
- 30 seconds, F9.5, ISO 640
For the image above we have used the same camera settings as before and changing the position of the off camer flash.
![painting with light]( "painting with light")
- 30 seconds, F9.5, ISO 640
in image above, we have triggered the flash twice during the 30 seconds exposure
![painting with light]( "painting with light")
- 30 seconds, F9.5, ISO 640
We have changed the light source and we have used a christmas tree light. SInce the image was overexposed to the a greater light source we had to change the settings
![painting with light]( "painting with light")
- 8 seconds, F9.5, ISO 320
![painting with light]( "painting with light")
- 20 Seconds, F19, ISO 320
for the image above we have modified the settings again for a change of light painting effect
![painting with light]( "painting with light")
- 10 seconds, F16, ISO 320
In order to be able to create interesting effects you can try to do some painting with light, based on the same principles and change the camera settings until you are happy with the results.You can note again the use of the flash. It is not necessary to use it, but we thought we made it a bit different than other people where you cannot see who is holding the light.
We hope you have enjoyed our light painting tutorial and feel free to leave comments, send us any similar articles and we’ll be happy to publish it here on Academy of photography website
The post light painting tutorial appeared first on Academy of Photography.