Light painting: fun with a Maglite ...

Light painting is a photographic technique in which exposures are usually made at night or in a dark room by moving an hand-held light source. Basically, there are two ways of using light painting: the most common, is to use the light source to make drawings and the like, thus producing a graffiti effect (do a search on Wikipedia for some nice samples). The other way, is to use the light source to illuminate a subject, and is the one i used here.



The required gear is the same in both cases: a tripod, because of the long exposure times, a flashlight (i used a Maglite, but you can use whatever you have available, although i got my best results with a spotty light sources), and a camera able to manual focus ...

At fist, start by positioning the camera in front of the subject to picture and focusing. hen, select an exposure time/f-stop pair, according to the power of the light source and the reflective power of your subject (which means, you have to try until you get the proper values ... A good starting point could be 6 seconds and f/8 ...). To minimize the camera shaking, i also switched on the 2 seconds delay on the camera ...

When ready to take a picture, turn off the lights, hit the shutter button on the camera, then start lighting your subject by moving the flashlight as if it were a paintbrush. In the perfume burner picture, i started from the base, then i lighted the arm supporting the upper beaker (note the white tracks), then the upper beaker itself.



The exposure for this picture was 8 seconds at f/11.

The Barcino elephant was lighted during 5 seconds at f/8 starting from the front (left side of the picture), then lasting a bit (maybe too much) on its rear legs ...



More to come ...