Painting with Light

A fun experiment for any photographer is light painting. The concept is very simple, light painting is a technique were the exposure is made in a dark area by selectively illuminating parts of the subject with a movable light source. The light I use is often a flashlight or a camera strobe with different color gel filters.



The above photo was taken in the dark of night. It is a 1/2 second exposure at ISO 1600 and the light comes from a passing car... I was going to use a flash to fill the photo but the car beat me to it. But this shows how lightpainting can be done to make interesting patterns in an otherwise standard photo.


A very simple use of lightpainting, this exposure lasted 15 seconds at ISO 200. As the moon backlit the scene I moved to the right side of the picture and holding a magenta gel over the flash popped off a few bursts of light. Yes it is that simple.


Another much longer exposure (116 seconds) from the same shoot, you can see the movement from the model. In this photo I used a cyan filter on the left side and popped off about 3 bursts of light. I then moved to the right and popped off 1 burst of light with a yellow filter. Just before closing the shutter I added some green light which I bounced off a screen to the ground.


Light painting can also be done by moving a point light source in the photo itself. In this image Amanda just held her position while I moved an LED flashlight around her.


In this photo which can be seen at the top of the page uses two colors with the flash a heavy blue gel just to the right and slightly above the camera and a magenta gel directly to the right of the model at her eye level. The red on Sam's boot comes from a large red neon light located on the roof of a building behind her.

So here are the basics of what you need to do this yourself. First you need a camera that you can lock the shutter open, this is normally called bulb mode. Most cameras will also need a shutter release cable. I have had some exposures go for multiple minutes. You will therefor need a sturdy tripod to set your camera on.
A light source, this could be a flashlight or a strobe and some color gels are nice to have also. The gels I use are the same that are used for stage lighting. They come in sheets that can be cut to fit the flash. You can order them online or they can often be found at your local music store.
After that you just need to use your imagination.


A simple lighting scheme using 3 filters cyan, red, and light orange.


Here I planed out this shot to take advantage of Laurens placement in the yellow flowers and the light gray colored rocks knowing that a cyan flash would make the yellow pop out and the rocks would take the color of the flash. I strategically placed Mat, the demon, so that the red flash on him would compliment the red tones in the sky. The purple in the middle of the photo was a consequence of the red and cyan flashes adding together.


This is also a bit more complex photograph. Lauren and I coordinated her slowly standing up while I popped off alternating colors of green-blue and red-orange.

I hope this will encourage you to try something new and different with some of your photos. The worse that will happen is you will get a blur or nothing at all. However when these photos work the results can be amazing.
After years of playing around with this technique I can now do it like second nature and I always end up with a great photo shoot.

Coming soon I will talk about how light and color work which should help with blending color filters in a photo and how they will affect objects and each other. However the best thing you can do is just go out and play around with it. Learning by doing is key in photography.